Posted on 08/22/2010 11:02:16 AM PDT by wagglebee
MADISON — At all hours, strangers phone Anne Nicol Gaylor's Madison home, always desperate.
The caller one recent morning was a middle-aged woman with a 14-year-old pregnant daughter.
"What clinic will she be using?" asked Gaylor, 83, jotting down the response and the cost of a second-trimester abortion ($875).
"If we helped with $300, do you think you could find the rest?" Gaylor asked.
After the call, Gaylor opened a checkbook for the Women's Medical Fund, a Madison nonprofit that has helped pay for abortions for 34 years. Gaylor has written every check for every abortion.
This was No. 18,986.
Controversial figure
Gaylor is well-known for leading the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison for decades. Less known is her work with the Women's Medical Fund, which she co-founded in 1976, the same year she helped start the foundation.
The fund's sole purpose is to pay for abortions. Last year, it paid out $162,202, about 75 percent of which came from individual donors, the rest from foundations.
There is no office and no paid staff. Gaylor, whose title is administrator, takes all of the calls — some 800 a year — at her dining room table on her home phone, the same one her four children and two granddaughters reach her on. There is no answering machine.
"It would burden anyone else to deal with all those calls," said her husband, Paul Gaylor, 84, a former vice president for a building maintenance company. "But she listens to every woman and cares for every single one of them."
The phone number isn't widely circulated. Women get referred from clinics, doctors and nurses.
"When you give money away, people find you," said Anne Nicol Gaylor, a petite woman with grayish-white hair and a soft voice.
'All about the child'
The Supreme Court legalized abortion three years before the fund began, but many women simply couldn't afford the procedure, said Bob West, 82, of Madison, a professor emeritus of chemistry and co-founder of the fund with his wife, Margaret West, now deceased, and Gaylor. The three had become friends through the Madison chapter of the group Zero Population Growth.
"For me, it was all about the child," he said. "In the kind of world I want to live in, all children would be wanted."
Gaylor said her motivation came from a doctor who told her about a girl who was raped by her father and had to drop out of high school to raise the child. "Those kind of stories are so numerous and so tragic," Gaylor said.
She sends out fundraising letters at least once a year, often tying the appeal to a significant event, such as Mother's Day.
"Of the 632 women the fund has helped so far this year, 147 were teenagers," Gaylor wrote to donors last Thanksgiving. "Of these, nine were only 13 years old, and one, not yet a teen, was just 12!"
Gaylor used the occasion of her 80th birthday to hold a fundraising party for the fund at the Madison home of Dr. Dennis Christensen, an abortion provider who has since retired. Gaylor sent invitations far afield, including one to a well-to-do woman in California she'd never met but who had donated to the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
The woman sent her regrets and a $20,000 check.
The other side
Anti-abortion activists have long been aware of the fund.
"It's a stark example of misguided compassion that serves as discrimination of the worst kind," said Peggy Hamill, state director of Pro-Life Wisconsin. "To finance extermination of pre-born children because those children would have been brought up poor is deplorable."
Gaylor said no one is chasing down low-income pregnant woman. They're simply the ones who come to her. "If that's discrimination, so be it," she said. She thinks critics would view the fund differently if they heard the calls.
"We get calls, too," counters Sue Armacost, legislative director for Wisconsin Right to Life. "We understand how heartbreaking some situations are, but the answer is not urging and assisting a woman to destroy her child."
Others call Gaylor a hero.
"She's been on the front lines of two of the most contentious issues in our society, what I call the two A's - abortion and atheism," said Nora Cusack of Madison, a retired business owner and board treasurer of the Women's Medical Fund. "It's astonishing how fearless she is."
A way with language
Gaylor may look like Betty White, but her words still carry the socko punch that once led an audience member at the taping of a Philadelphia talk show to rush her from behind and put her in a chokehold.
On large families: "How presumptuous of someone to think the world is interested in a half-dozen or eight or 10 of their kids."
On anti-abortion activists: "They're religiously motivated, not intellectually motivated."
On abortion: "A blessing."
Gaylor said she has never had an abortion but once witnessed the procedure when a woman asked her to be in the room for support. It did not change her views, she said.
On the phone with strangers, Gaylor is gentle but pointed in her questioning.
"The guy who got you pregnant, is he helping you pay?" she asked a 19-year-old woman from Sheboygan with two children and a third on the way.
"What will you do next time so this doesn't happen again?" she asked a 25-year-old woman from Madison.
Looking ahead
The last three years have been tough on Gaylor's health. A blood clot took the vision in her left eye, and she has an inflammatory disorder that causes muscle soreness and stiffness.
She retired from the presidency of the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 2004. It is now run by her daughter and son-in-law, Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker.
The board of directors of the Women's Medical Fund has not discussed a succession plan, said West, who has been board president since its start. "It's something I probably need to talk to her about," he said, adding that he would defer to her wishes.
Gaylor does not mention slowing down. "My regret is that we don't have $1 million a year to give away so that we could help more women," she said.
So, why should the baby die because of the crime of his or her father? As I asked earlier, in what other cases are the children of the criminal put to death?
That said, my stand on abortion always has been the same; that it should be treated much like homicide.
Yet you support it in cases that ARE NOT homicide.
A woman, like a man, has the right to kill in self-defense. If she has a bona-fide medical reason that a pregnancy will kill her, then she should have an abortion in a hospital.
Another red herring as nobody has suggested otherwise and, just so we are clear, carrying a child of rape IS NOT life threatening.
But pro-life advocates and protestors forced most hospitals to stop providing abortions, exactly the places where a board of doctors used to decide the validity of a life-saving need for an abortion.
This is a pro-abortion talking point which is PATENTLY FALSE. There is not a hospital in the nation that will not perform abortions where the mother will die otherwise.
Now we have an entire industry of abortion providers doing exactly what we don’t want: killing the unborn.
If you don't want abortion then why are you pushing all of the pro-abortion talking points?
83 years old. How could someone that age have learned so little?Yes, indeed, and I bet Jesus lets her live a while longer just so she gets the opportunity to repent. Remember Ted Kennedy? Brain cancer and suffering. Jesus was pulling out all the stops in his regard.
Because we shouldn’t victimize women twice; the first time when they are raped, and second when forced to carry a child of a criminal conceived during a rape.How does having a child "victimize" a women? How is KILLING that child "self defense"?...
A woman, like a man, has the right to kill in self-defense. If she has a bona-fide medical reason that a pregnancy will kill her, then she should have an abortion in a hospital.
uh, a 14 year old who is pregnant has been sexually abused. Legally, it was statuatory rape.
Note the mom is more interested in hiding her “shame” than in protecting her daughter.
>>Because we shouldn’t victimize women twice; the first time when they are raped, and second when forced to carry a child of a criminal conceived during a rape.<<
So killing her own child makes her feel better?
Why not carry to term and give that child to a couple who is dying to have a baby?
Why not make something good out of something evil?
I would say that it's just as likely that she has a boyfriend who is basically the same age.
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Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
This sounds a lot like Zero's belief that a baby is "punishment."
That's why arguments based on "the life of the mother" are mostly uninformed, or irrelevant.
“Actually she is a deceived sinful soul held in bondage the Satan.”
Very true. She needs to be prayed for.
I think she’s like a serial killer by proxy. If she really embraced zero population growth she damn sure would have had herself sterilized and not had 4 children.
Once when I was very young, stupid, immoral and lost, I had sex with two men in one night; one of them wasn’t really invited, and in fact was a surprise even, but I was on drugs and probably alcohol as well and could not protest.
I got pregnant. I had a junk job, lived in a rented room in an attic, and neither man had the slightest interest in any kind of permanent relationship with me. I saw the pregnancy as a horrible problem and could see no other solution. I felt horribly sick and knew nothing about health or taking care of my body or the baby, and I was very estranged from my family.
I had an abortion.
I still cry and repent about my crime.
I think of how he or she would be 40 years old, most likely with children of their own. A few years later I met a friend, who had gotten pregnant out of wedlock around the same time.
She went through with her pregnancy, and gave the baby up for adoption. How I wish I had done that! Perhaps if people were on the street in front of the abortionist and counseled me I might have made the right choice.
If you had been the product of rape or a very wrong decision, would you rather that someone had killed you, or that you had been allowed to be born?
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
You weren’t raped; you made a really bad choice. People make mistakes and adults learn to deal with those mistakes. One can do so WITHOUT compounding it by committing murder (abortion). This child you aborted could have made a couple, somewhere, very happy parents.
I know you feel guilty about it but it seems you’re aware that it was wrong. As Christians we are forgiven not to sin again.
I’m not terribly forgiving on this subject. A relative of mine, who I refuse to speak to, has had seven abortions. Only one was to save her life (eclampsia - a medically sound reason, at six weeks of pregnancy, to seek an abortion.) Her unborn baby was dead and had become toxic. Five abortions were due to supposed tubal pregnancies and the last was just because she didn’t want the child. She argues vociferously that her abortions were justified but I’m having non of it.
“If you had been the product of rape or a very wrong decision, would you rather that someone had killed you, or that you had been allowed to be born?”
Hypothetical questions of this sort don’t move me. The reason being they’re ususally made to manipulate a perferred answer based on guilt. Let me just say this: adults make judgements every day and it should be up to the individual woman who has been a rape victim to decide.
Many years ago I was beaten and raped. As I discovered years later I couldn’t have children so I couldn’t concieve, but I didn’t know that at the time and considered what I would do if pregnant. Since my mother had suffered severely during pregnancies due to uremic poisonning and in the end almost died during “C” sections, I chose the same as you. (Of the three babies my mother had who survived preganancy, one died three days following birth and the other two had physical abnormalities). If married, I would have been willing to face any obstacle to have a child.
But you see, I have compassion for the rape victim because I’ve been one.
Many women have been raped and chosen life.
I cannot see the logic justifying killing a child who is innocent, because a man did a great wrong.
“If she is evil, what do you call the situation of a 12-year old pregnant by her father?”
Evil.
What’s your point?
“Because we shouldn’t victimize women twice”
Then a rape victim should NEVER have an abortion.
Women aren’t baby machines. Pregnancy can be risky and women do die in childbirth. It should be the rape victim’s choice whether to have that child, not yours.
Abortion is not a compassionate response. It seems like an easy way out but it is not. Now the woman will carry physical and emotional scars from the rape and from the abortion. Carrying a child to term will be difficult but can be a healing process as well. If she raises the baby herself she can find joy from that. If she gives the baby away, she will find peace knowing she did the very hard but right thing.
What I was saying is that abortion victimizes women. Yes pregnancy can be risky and women do die in childbirth. Abortions can also be risky and women can die from abortions. Again, what is your point???
Is an unborn child a person or not? If so, even the child of a rape victim deserves to have their rights protected!
If not, you have no right to be upset if your cousin has 50 unneccesary abortions.
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