Many of you have heard of this woman by now. She says she’s a 26-year-old graduate student who lives in a state that requires a 72-hour waiting period between a consultation for an abortion procedure and the procedure itself.
On July 7, this anonymous woman will give pro-lifers 72 hours to donate one million dollars to her website. If they do, she’ll let her child live, place the child for adoption and put the money in a trust for him or her. If not, she’ll abort her child and return the donations.
She anticipates that pro-lifers won’t give her the money, which she will interpret as pro-lifers only caring about babies, and not women. To make her point, she’ll abort her child on July 10.
Her website domain name is ProlifeAntiWoman. We, at ProWomanProLife, felt compelled to respond to her open letter with our own.
Dear Anonymous Pro-Choicer,
Pro-lifers believe that their position is consistent with a worldview that demonstrates care for all humans, whether they are at their earliest stages of development inside their mothers’ wombs, or outside in the world, fighting for their rights. We see that women remain particularly vulnerable in today’s world. For example, millions of women are exploited each year in sex trafficking. In some countries, girls are still fighting for the right to be educated, or simply to drive and generally to provide a better world for their own daughters.
Faye Sonier
All girls also face a horrific battle just to survive, at their earliest stage of development. As The Economist reported a few years ago, millions of girls are being aborted due to cultural preferences for male children. The shortage of women in certain countries leads to more sex trafficking, providing a correlated rights abuse between easy access to abortion and human trafficking, something the compassion of pro-choicers is blind toward.
In short, we care about women too, in ways you don’t and we endeavour to walk our talk. We regularly donate to charities that seek to end the sex-trafficking of women, help girls attend schools in cultures that discourage it and also seek to raise awareness about the value and the life of females, even as they grow in the womb. We give to pregnancy care centres that extend care well beyond a couple of diapers, and to pro-adoption charities. There are numerous pro-lifers we are aware of caring for children with disabilities, with fetal alcohol syndrome, even babies who are addicted to drugs their mothers took, perhaps not even knowing they were pregnant before they gave birth. Our care extends regardless of age, level of development or their abilities or political outlook. We even care about you.
While we cannot give funds to your campaign for the reasons set out below, if you’re willing to waive your anonymity, we’d willingly provide our tax receipts to you, and we’d ask you to do the same in all fairness. We’ve all been giving for years. When we had more funds, we’ve given more, and during hard years of financial difficulty, we’ve given less, but we’ve given. We’ve also volunteered, helped women in our lives with childcare and can provide you with information so you can ask them about it.
Andrea Mrozek
I hope you’re reasonable enough to understand why it’s ridiculous to expect hard-working citizens to donate one million dollars to an anonymous person on the internet, when our funds could go to registered charities doing great work that have financial reporting and accountability measures in place.
Would you donate one million dollars to an anonymous pro-lifer who simply promised to spend your money on one endeavour or another? Of course not.
The argument that underlies your campaign is one that pro-choicers have been making for years. It’s the oft-repeated ‘Pro-lifers don’t care about women, and they don’t care about babies once they are born. They have no right to speak against abortion unless they are willing to care for these children.’
You’ve actually taken the rhetoric an unfathomable step further by being willing to sacrifice your own child in order to make this point. The argument that you’ve adopted basically states that if you’re unwilling to personally provide a solution for a certain problem, then you’ve lost the ability to speak out against that problem or injustice. An example to expose the intellectual poverty of your argument: We assume you care about domestic violence. Yet we also assume you do not provide a shelter in your apartment or home for every woman in your community who suffers abuse. Would it be reasonable on our part to then turn around and void your concern for spousal abuse?
The same could be said for any number of charitable endeavours.
We might add that yes, there are some activist pro-lifers who do little more than aim to draw attention to the plight of people who are killed in their mother’s womb. If we changed the issue—say to those who draw attention to the plight of the prisoner in totalitarian regimes, or those who draw attention to the plight of the hungry by doing nothing more than the odd 24-hour fast, we wouldn’t say that is wrong. We’d say they are doing what they can. The problem is that with the pro-life movement, you reject our premise and fail to see fighting for the human right to life at all ages as a valid cause. If you accepted the cause, you’d accept the effort, however meager. Pro-lifers are not the only ones who can be charged with hypocrisy.
In short, the argument that underlies your campaign is flawed. Your means to achieving it is one most reasonable people would never consider endorsing, much less financially supporting. And you’re making a life or death decision on these poor considerations. And getting the media to buy into your web page, suggesting you are not without resource or at very least, not without great media contacts.
In your state of residence, you are free to make a choice to kill your child. As you noted, you are also free to choose to place your child in a loving home of your choice. In the end, the choice is clearly yours, in every conceivable way. At ProWomanProLife, we have the tagline “Canada without abortion, by choice,” asking women to look outside politics and laws to consider in their hearts what abortion is. May you choose to do so, instead of launching manipulative and exploitative publicity stunts.
Sincerely,
Faye Sonier & Andrea Mrozek
by 
I almost wonder if it wouldn’t be better to just ignore the publicity stunt. She’s just an attention-seeker. I’ve seen this in a few prolife arenas–has it come up in any more mainstream channels? If she didn’t get the attention she so obviously craves, then we could plausibly claim that not enough people knew about her plight to come up with the one million.
Nothing like holding your own kid hostage, eh? I think what she is doing is remarkably like selling a baby, which has to be illegal.
Perhaps part of this publicity stunt is in response to pro-life publicity stunts? Is she not personally anonymous? I think it would be fair to see her as someone who is seeking attention for her perspective, just like the people who protest abortion.
Jesse, with all due respect there is a huge difference. Holding your own child hostage and protesting to save unborn children can not be compared. The abortion providers are so good at convincing women that killing their child is the direction to go. Rarely do they offer alternatives that would save the life of the child. Prolife advocates work to provide answers without murder and connect women with resources.
Agreed, Melissa, she shouldn’t get publicity. But Vice picked it up and ran with it before we did…and that’s a pretty major source of attention. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, so at that point I figured–it’s already a successful publicity stunt, we might as well point out the obvious flaws where the media won’t.
Andrea, could you clarify the purpose of your letter for me? I noticed a fair amount of language in your letter that is manipulative and exploitative. Was this aimed to satisfy an audience, promote a cause, denigrate someone who doesn’t seem to agree with the tenants of your perspective of abortion? It also seems that the letter doesn’t directly address a question the prochoicer has raised to the prolifer: if you truly believe in your cause, why not make effort to find the money? Unreasonable or not in her method, this person is raising a fair question to a group not known for being reasonable in their methods. So, considering the eternal value of a child potentially realized, why is 1,000,000 a steep price tag? Please answer directly.
Jesse: under no circumstances would I advise anyone to give money to an anonymous person online. As for your other comments I would need to know precisely what you found manipulative to comment.
Hi Jesse,
Thanks for your comments.
In the letter, we addressed the issues that her position and strategy raise. I think it is fair game to do so of a public campaign. To critique such a public campaign is not unreasonable nor uncalled for.
I disagree with you that she is raising a fair question – whether pro-lifers are unreasonable and don’t walk their talk – and we challenged her on that point by offering her our own charitable tax receipts. We’re only two of the multitude of pro-lifers in North America, but we care, we give and we act in a manner that is (we hope) more often than not consistent with our worldview. Andrea and I are not all unique in this. I’m sure we could email our own small pro-life network, and dozens of other pro-lifers could offer up their charitable receipts to demonstrate the same.
While we cannot advocate that people give money to anonymous folks and random internet pages, we will continue to give to good causes, run by good people, with good governance and accountability practices in place. We do care about the unborn and women, and for this reason we can’t give away a valuable resource – our financial donations – to an anonymous person who may or may be who she claims, and who may or may not spend the resources in the way she says she will. How can we do otherwise? We want our dollars to have the greatest likelihood of helping people and saving lives. For us, this is a life and death issue. It would be utterly irresponsible to give the money to this anonymous woman.
If she is a real person and she does change her mind about her campaign, she can ask for help from the pro-life community and we will show up in droves. If she chooses to go public and ask for her help providing for her child or placing her child for adoption, I have no doubt that the pro-life community will show up and offer her support in any way she needs. If an organization from which she is seeking help sets up a GoFundMe page to provide for her or her child, she’ll receive financial help. If she wants to keep her anonymity, there are very likely resources in her community to help her out. She can even email us at PWPL, and we can help her, in confidence, connect with them.
Is 1 million dollars a steep price to save a child’s life? No. And this is the question she asked and we responded to in our letter and I’m addressing in this novel of a comment.
But in this case we don’t even know if this woman or child exists. Over the last several years, we’ve all read of numerous crowd funding campaigns where parents, who went public with their stories, requested funds to pay for their children’s surgeries, treatments, etc. and they received donations. I have no doubt both pro-choicers and pro-lifers gave to those causes. We don’t need an anonymous extortion ploy by someone threatening to kill her baby to know that people care.
Jesse, I don’t know how else to put it: if we do not give our money to this anonymous person threatening to kill her child, it does not mean we don’t care about children and women. And for all the reasons noted above, here and elsewhere. I’m not sure how else to put it.
Thank you Faye & Andrea! So heartening to read this. Made my day.
Thanks Sandra!
You’re most welcome, Sandra. 🙂
BTW, here’s the Vice report:
https://news.vice.com/article/woman-asks-pro-life-movement-to-donate-1-million-to-prevent-her-abortion
It’s ironic that the response the pro-life camp offers the pro-choice camp is a rhetorical effort to manipulate public perception of the character of a prochoicer making a rhetorical effort to manipulate public perception of the character of prolifers… Good work. You’ve won a great victory for the Lord this day.
Well done and well said. A great, encouraging read, especially after the sad feelings generated by the prolifeantiwoman letter.
The contents of each letter speak volumes about the characters behind them.
I cannot get onto that page. Perhaps she has taken it down? At any rate, this is blackmail of the worst kind. If she doesn’t get her money, she can kill her child and blame other people for it. It proves nothing but the moral vacuity that can justify killing for financial reasons and that killing is worth a gotcha moment.
The link that was supposed to go live at 12:01 is dead. I never imagined someone who was so pro-abortion would make such a tremendous sacrifice just to prove a political point. If it was real, I think a lot of us would have done what we were advised not to do. I planned on giving $40. I understand more than most, though…my son came to me because of the sacrifice of his mother. I couldn’t ~NOT~ give and see the child live to be adopted, like my Ben. I guess I was too close to it.
Went back to the website… and found this “The previous website was an augmented excerpt from the novel […]” (sorry, I don’t wish to advertise for her book, so I won’t put the title, but you can find it easily).
It was just advertising ! A really sick, disgusting piece of advertising, but the “woman” only put her website up to advertise for a book ! No need to say that I won’t buy the thing. But at least, it is a relief to see the whole thing is a fake. No baby was harmed, it was just a hoax.