Chastity & the Pro-Life Movement 

by Mattei Radu  

Division has been an unfortunate reality of the American prolife movement (PLM) since its inception almost 40 years ago. Those committed to ending abortion have disagreed on political tactics, direct-action methods, contraception, and the public display of graphic photos of murdered preborn babies. I was intimately involved, while President of the Villanova University prolife group, with another controversial stance: chastity. My advocacy of this virtue was criticized by some of my fellow Villanovans for Life, and by many in the wider prolife movement. The purpose of this article is to examine what is at stake in this intra-movement debate and to ultimately show that those prolifers in favor of incorporating chastity into the fight to end abortion are correct in their position (referred to hereafter as the “Chastity-PLM position”).

It is important to clarify exactly what is meant by the “Chastity-PLM position.” The prolife movement has classically had four pillars: direct action, alternatives (i.e., crisis pregnancy centers), education, and politics. The “Chastity-PLM” argument is designed to convince prolifers of the need to add chastity advocacy as a fifth pillar. This does not mean making chastity education the only focus of the PLM, or even the primary one. Rather, it should be one of five equally important pillars of the PLM, for any one pillar without the others will not crush the monster of child-killing in the U.S.

Substantive Arguments

The central case for chastity advocacy as an essential part of the prolife movement is simply one of cause and effect. A survey of all abortions committed in the U.S. between 1980 and 2000 found that 80.1 percent of all abortions were committed on unmarried women. Promiscuity causes widespread abortion; as such, the only way to truly and finally defeat abortion is by destroying its root cause.

In 1960 the oral contraceptive pill (the Pill) first became available on the U.S. market. Whether for virtuous reasons of not, the vast majority of unmarried people before this time had abstained from sexual intercourse (if they didn’t, the usual course was to marry and care for the child). However, the widespread availability of the Pill facilitated a great revolt against traditional Christian sexual morality. By 1968 unmarried people were having an exponentially greater amount of sex than before.

Eventually, people who were carrying out this sexual revolution found themselves, despite the promises of the Pill, pregnant with children they didn’t want. So, in the tradition of the radical autonomy that is “free sex,” they demanded an easy way out of the responsibility of parenthood so that they could continue their promiscuous behavior. And they got abortion.

Abortion is an essential part of a promiscuous society, as ours is today. Even the Supreme Court admitted as much in its majority opinion on Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which in 1992 reconfirmed legal child-killing in the U.S.: “for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.”

Peter Kreeft of Boston College had this to say in his most recent work on abortion:

Abortion is the sacrament of the Sexual Revolution. Abortion, as last-ditch birth control, frees women to have sex without babies and frees men even more from sexual responsibility…Our society is a society of sex addicts, and addicts simply cannot think clearly about their addiction, whether to cocaine, alcohol, sex, self-esteem, shopping, or autonomy…I have been told repeatedly by pro-choice people, once our discussion becomes candid and heated, that the bottom line in the abortion battle is not about babies but about adult sex lives;…that they will practice their chosen sexual lifestyle come hell or high water or unplanned pregnancy…Abortion is backup contraception, and contraception is the demand to have sex without babies. It is physically impossible for there to be abortion without there having been sex; only sex makes the baby that abortion kills…Abortion is the necessary trump card against the fearful “alternative lifestyle” of motherhood and family and responsibility…Abortion is the insurance against that fate worse than death which is called a family. Our no-fault insurance has removed our responsibility for car accidents, and no-fault divorce has removed our responsibility from marriage accidents; why should abortion not be our no-fault insurance policy that removes our responsibility for sex-accidents?…But what are these sex-accidents? People! (Three Approaches to Abortion [Ignatius], pp. 63-66)

While it is reasonable to believe that murder would be an unthinkable option for parents in a crisis pregnancy (CP), history has shown that, sadly, it is not. Whether reluctantly or not, between 1967 and 2003 parents have flocked to abortion mills when confronted by a CP, for a total of over 42 million preborn murders.

The truth is that, for a number of reasons, parents in a CP are struck with panic and fear by the existence of their newly created child. They cease to think reasonably and become consumed with getting rid of “the problem” at all costs – a point that cannot be overstated. This lack of rational thought causes the sad situation seen at abortion facilities across the country. Mothers, despite biological instincts to protect their precious little ones, refuse free help for them and their babies from prolife sidewalk counselors; instead they resolutely stick to the unthinkable action of having their child killed by a hired assassin.

Objections and Replies

As for prolifers not in the Chastity-PLM camp, I will present what some of them have actually said to me in various debates and state their claims in the strongest possible terms.

Claim 1: Chastity has nothing to do with respect for human life – specifically preborn life. One’s views on sexual morality do not affect one’s views on crimes against innocent human life.

The evidence I have already given shows how false this first claim is.

Claim 2: Abortion in modern America has been caused by ignorance more than anything else, not by promiscuity. People have not been properly educated about the humanity of the preborn baby or about the truly murderous nature of abortion. If the people in general, and specifically parents in a crisis pregnancy, knew these facts, abortion would end, regardless of their sexual practices.

This seems to be a particularly odd assertion in light of the fact that substantial amounts of the knowledge about pre-natal human life available in current high school biology books did not exist until the early 1970s – when the sonogram was introduced by medical researchers. In other words, the people of two generations ago, who were less educated about life within the womb than the general public of today, were more prolife than their more erudite counterparts.

I find it specious to claim that parents “don’t know what they’re doing” when they obtain an abortion. While I certainly grant that a grand propagandistic education program has been successfully implemented by abortion advocates, it is hard to believe that people today have totally lost the simplest of intellectual capabilities. After all, there are very few (if any) people within America’s borders who haven’t learned how human beings are created, that they themselves and everyone else came from the womb, and that the time they spent there is commonly known as “pregnancy.” Such common sense used to be known as “the facts of life,” and was presumably known by everyone past the age of 13. From these basic facts, one can derive the truth about abortion. The syllogism goes something like this: (a) pregnancy equals the existence of a human; (b) abortion destroys pregnancy (admitted by everyone); (c) abortion destroys human life. Thus, any intellectually honest person must ask whether Americans today really don’t know the “facts of life” contained within their biology books, or are just choosing to ignore them to achieve a certain end.

This point is perhaps best illustrated by the very people who procure abortions. A study done by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, research affiliate of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, on why women who were actually in the waiting room of abortion facilities obtaining abortions, found that 76 percent admitted that “a baby would change my life.” If the baby didn’t exist, there would be no need to get the abortion in the first place – yet these mothers do know that the baby exists and are still going through with the gruesome child-killing process.

What has caused these better-educated generations to be much more hostile to life? Has the general blood-lust among Americans increased so dramatically over the past thirty-five years? The overwhelming evidence already provided herein suggests that it is Americans’ desire for unrestricted sex – the only guarantor of which is abortion-on-demand.

Claim 3: The need to defeat abortion is paramount, above all other (admittedly good) activities – such as promoting the virtue of chastity. Thus, the PLM must have as broad an appeal as possible – so that people of different faiths and moral theories (on questions other than abortion) can come together to end child-killing. Chastity will drive people away from the PLM.

Advocates of chastity as an essential part of the PLM do not claim that their approach will draw more people into the movement than the strictly anti-abortion approach did. However, they do offer a true solution to the abortion holocaust, as opposed to essentially stop-gap measures. After all, how effective will laws proscribing abortion be if the intense desire for abortion remains in the culture? To end abortion, we must sever its roots. In the long run, principle and not practicality will bring about a Culture of Life.

The evidence is irrefutable: promiscuity causes abortion. Thus, it follows that prolifers must reverse the plague of premarital sex if they hope to end child-killing in the U.S., for a successful attack on the causes of evil is the only way to truly end that evil. For this reason the prolife movement of the 21st century must adopt chastity as the fifth pillar of advocacy for preborn children, thereby showing the strategic foresight necessary to win the war against abortion in the U.S. and throughout the world.