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Not Even For Rape, Says Jenni Maas

Jenni Maas had just begun her pro-life talk at Towson University April 14 when three protesters, two male and one female, came in the back of the room.

The female protester, attired completely in black, sported a nose ring, orange hair and a large buck knife hanging from her belt.  She carried a sign reading, “Keep Choice Legal at All Costs.”

“Come in, you’re welcome!” Jenni called out to them.

She really meant it.

“The university campus is the best place for the discussion on abortion to take place,” the pretty, young speaker had told her audience at Mount St. Mary University in Emmitsburg earlier that day:  “If pro-lifers don’t shape the argument on campuses, it will fall to the lowest common denominator, with disastrous consequences.

“Have a sense of humor,” she advised.  “And above all, listen to what people say.”

If the three Towson University protesters paid attention to what the Defend Life-sponsored speaker had to say, they heard a startling story that made mincemeat of a favorite “pro-choice” rationale.

Jenni told of a girl who grew up in Tennessee, the daughter of an alcoholic, abusive father and a mentally unstable mother.

When the girl was 7, her mother was placed in a mental institution, and she and her six brothers and sisters were sent to an orphanage.

When she was about 13, a nun at the Catholic orphanage showed her a newspaper story headlined, “Mother of 7 Hanged in Basement.”

That was how she learned of her mother’s suicide.

Shortly afterwards, her father took all of his children out of the orphanage and told the girl that she was in charge of them.

Her father continued to drink and abuse the children.  The girl graduated from high school.  She had a boyfriend, but he was pressuring her to have sex, and she adamantly refused his advances.

One night she came home and went to bed, not knowing that the boy had hidden himself in her closet.  That night he raped her.

Three and a half months later she learned she was pregnant.

Her father kicked her out of the house.  Everyone, including her grandmother and the youth who raped her, urged her to get an abortion.

But something within her told her that the life she was carrying was sacred, and despite all the odds against her, she managed to carry the child to birth.

“The woman who went through all this was my mother,” said Jenni.  “I’m the child she was carrying.”

By the time Maas was in junior high school, her mother had gradually revealed to her the circumstances of her birth.

“My mother said that having me helped her to heal from the rape, because it was the only good thing that came out of it.”

Jenni’s mom was very involved in pro-life activities, but she herself was only nominally pro-life, until one day in junior high she was walking down the hall with a girlfriend, and the subject of abortion came up.

Her friend remarked, “I don’t like abortion, but I think it should be legal in cases of rape and incest.”

“That really hit me to the heart,” Maas recalled.  “I felt like I was looking death in the face.”

That incident was a turning point in Jenni’s life.  

“I realized that God had a plan for me,” she said.

Determined to fulfill God’s plan for her life, Jenni became active in the pro-life movement.

After high school she worked with orphans in Romania and refugees in Bosnia.

At Franciscan University in Steubenville, she was president of the campus pro-life group.

After college, for three years she worked full-time for the Human Life Alliance.

HLA would put ads on college campuses and encourage students to e-mail them and “let us know what you think.”

“I would dialog with them,” said Maas.  “One of the most critical things is to dialog.  Many pro-lifers just throw out statements, say, ‘No, you’re wrong.’  You should say, ‘Tell me your story.  Tell me why you’re for it.’

“So keep the dialog open – but before you do, learn your stuff.

“And if you want to persuade someone who is pro-abortion to be pro-life, you need to love them to pieces!”

Pro-lifers must also keep in mind that, as Pope John Paul II said in his encyclical, The Gospel of Life, in order to bring about a Culture of Life, we will be asked to give up things.

“It’s through sacrifice that so many things come about,” she said.

Over 100 students attended Maas’s talk at Towson University, which was sponsored by the Towson University Republicans and the Newman Club.  

After her talk about ten students told Defend Life Director Jack Ames they would like to start a campus pro-life group.

Mass’s two-day lecture tour included talks at John Carroll High School in Bel Air and Mount de Sales Academy in Catonsville, St. Charles Boromeo Church in Arlington, Va., and St. Martin of Tours Church in Gaithersburg.