MOM BABY GOD: Mocking a Pro-Life Generation
Just when we thought we saw the craziest of the crazy that the abortion movement had to offer this July in Austin, Texas, we got this: MOM BABY GOD, a new play created to fictionalize the work of Students for Life of America and some of our compatriots in the pro-life movement.
Last month, one of our Students for Life team members attended the play's premiere in New York City and filmed it undercover. While the footage is too vulgar to release to the general public, I can tell you that the plot of the play is pretty unoriginal. It takes place at a fictionalized Students for Life National Conference, where young pro-lifers appear tragically sex-deprived and brainwashed into their pro-life convictions.
MOM BABY GOD was created by abortion advocate Madeline Burrows, a Hampshire College graduate who developed the play out of her undergraduate thesis in theater and women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Research for the play took place via a year-long hiatus she spent going undercover as a pro-lifer and attending a number of pro-life events, including my organization's Students for Life of America National Conference, the largest pro-life conference in the nation. After attending these events, Burrows felt the need to respond to the pro-life movements "attack on women's reproductive rights" was more urgent than ever.
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In her fundraising video for her play, Burrows says that she became disturbed and worried for the future of the abortion movement after attending our National Conference, explaining she "was really afraid to see all these people who had just come to the conclusion that they needed to abolish abortion on their own terms." Burrows realized, as former NARAL Pro-Choice America president Nancy Keenan has put it, "There are so many of them and they are so young."
When it comes to undercover investigations, the pro-life movement has dug up some real issues and law-breaking behavior within the abortion movement. Just a few years ago, when I was pregnant with my first son, I went undercover at a federally funded Planned Parenthood in New Jersey where a nurse told me that I could abort my son at 22 weeks by birthing him and letting him die. That's infanticide. It's shocking every time new horrors of the abortion industry come to light through pro-life undercover investigations, and it's often because of the work of undercover pro-lifers that risks to women's health and dignity are exposed for the first time.
But when Madeline Burrows decided to go undercover for a year as a pro-lifer to collect fodder for MOM BABY GOD, her discoveries weren't exactly shocking. Disappointingly, she found in pregnancy-resource centers, conferences, and rallies plenty of evidence that the pro-life movement is strong, but no bombshell that mainstream America isn't already aware of. So Burrows took a little creative license and set aside actual facts to craft a theatrical mockery of the work that we do at Students for Life of America. She's admitted that she had to fictionalize the conference, and, in the Q&A session after her play's premiere, she said that she even had to change information about fetal development relayed in the play because the truth was causing some of her (mostly left-wing) audience to question their pro-choice views.
The play failed to relate any shocking motive behind the youthful momentum that the pro-life movement has steadily gained over the 40 years since Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Just the same old rhetoric we hear from the other side every day.
Some have asked if I'm upset by the creation of the play - that couldn't be further from the truth. It's an honor to know that seeing 2,000-plus young people at the largest pro-life conference in America is cause for great concern for pro-abortion advocates. They should be worried.
Students for Life has helped start over 600 pro-life student groups in the last seven years, and we are currently working with over 760 active groups across the nation. No pro-abortion organization comes close in size to our grassroots momentum. All of the polling data is on our side. Technology is on our side.
We know this is the pro-life generation. They can try to mock us all they want, but the facts won't change.
