Texas State University (February, 2026)
Since I last wrote I was able to travel to south Texas and conduct four days of outreach at Texas State and University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Additionally, I was able to help with Justice For All’s interactive workshop for UTSA’s pro-life club. I am also happy to announce that taking all of the monthly pledges and special gifts into account, I am fully funded! A huge thank you to all of my generous supporters. I’m so grateful for my supporters who make it possible for me to have these important discussions. I would like to share a conversation I had on my Texas trip.
A student I’ll call “Max” at UTSA approached our poll table, “Should Abortion Be Legal?” (see images). After he had signed, I asked him what his thoughts were on abortion. He said that he was pro-choice. Using what I had learned from JFA’s workshops, I proceeded to ask him some clarifying questions about his view. First I asked him if he supported abortion through all nine months of pregnancy or if he thought there should any limit timewise. He replied that he did support abortion through all nine months. This initially made me think he had a more extreme view on abortion than most people, but I continued to inquire by asking him in what circumstances he supported abortion.
It turned out that he only supported abortion in the case of rape. This surprised me because a lot of people will bring up rape to support their pro-choice position, but they generally also support abortions for all sorts of other much less horrific reasons. Max was one of the first I’ve encountered during my internship with this view. (He also had said right off the bat that he did believe that the unborn is a human person.) Now that I understood his particular view, I focused on our common ground related to the evil of rape.
University of Texas at San Antonio (February, 2026)
I agreed with Max that rape is a horrific crime that leaves its victims severely traumatized. I told him that I think our society and we as individuals need to work harder to prevent these crimes from occurring. Moreover, we need to support victims and help them find healing. Additionally, we both agreed that a lot of our laws need to be much stricter in punishing the perpetrators of these sorts of crimes and that too often rapists are not prosecuted or get off with just a slap on the wrist.
I always try to start any of my discussions by finding common ground with the other person because it helps ease the tension and makes people so much more open to a differing view. When someone brings up rape, I try to focusing on sympathizing with his concerns and agreeing with everything that I can without compromising my view, all the more because it is such a sensitive and intense topic. Moreover, you never know if the person with whom you are speaking has experienced assault or if someone close to him has. Throughout my time with JFA, I have been saddened by how frequently college students have shared with me that they have experienced assault. I try to always keep in mind that when we are discussing rape, it very well might not be hypothetical for the student. I’ve often seen pro-lifers dismiss the case of rape by saying that it only constitutes about 1% of the abortions in the U.S., which is true, but if that is the first thing you say, it can come off as dismissive of the horror of rape. If the pro-choice person does not think that you care about sexual violence against vulnerable people in general, he will likely feel that your claim that you care about violence against vulnerable unborn people is not genuine.
Once I had established some of what we believed in common, I began to gently challenge his view. Here is the gist of the rest of our conversation:
Martha: Can I present you with a hypothetical situation?
Max: Sure.
Martha: Imagine there are two women who tragically have been raped and both become pregnant. One of the women is now two months pregnant and the other has a toddler as a result. Now this is going to sound like a crazy question, but please bear with me. Could both women kill their children?
Max: Of course not! It would be murder for the woman to kill her toddler.
Martha: I completely agree! Again this will probably sound like a ridiculous question, but I think it will actually help us get at something crucial. Why would it be wrong for her to end the life of her child who was conceived in rape?
Max: Well, I guess because he’s a human being.
Martha: I totally agree. If the unborn is a human being, as you mentioned earlier, just like the toddler, then shouldn’t we protect the unborn child regardless of the circumstances of his conception the same as we would protect the toddler conceived in rape?
Max: I’d never thought about it that way before.
Martha: After all, both of these women are in the exact same circumstance. The only significant difference is the age of each child. Now this is not necessarily going to be every woman’s experience and every woman is different, but some women who have experienced rape and have gotten abortions have later said that the abortion was more traumatic for them than the rape.
Max: Really? I’m kind of shocked to hear that. I never really thought about how getting an abortion could also be traumatic for a woman.
Martha: I think that often people feel like abortion can “fix” or “undo” the rape. I think this comes from a good place of wanting to help the victim and erase the horrible thing that happened to her. The problem is that abortion won’t “undo” the rape. If a woman conceives, even through something as evil and horrific as rape, she is still a mother. Abortion will only make her the mother of a dead child; it will not heal her trauma.
Throughout the conversation Max was agreeing with me. At the close of our conversation he thanked me and said that abortion should not be legal even in the case of rape. I was really encouraged by this distinct shift in Max’s view from thinking that abortion in the case of rape should be legal through all nine months of pregnancy to thinking that even in the case of rape abortion should be illegal. Thank you again to all those who support my work through your prayers or financial gifts and help me to come alongside people like Max to help them think more clearly about the value of unborn children.
