The following cover letter and supporting document was sent to every state legislator in Greenville and Spartanburg Counties of South Carolina. Almost 300 signatures accompanied them. I also used the Cover Letter when giving testimony before the State House of Representatives concerning Representative McCravy's "Human Life Protection Act" on March 4, 2025.
Petition to the South Carolina House of Representatives Natural Family Planning and Family Values over Contraception and Abortion
House Speaker Murrell Smith (SC House District 67)
Speaker Pro-Tem Tommy Pope (SC House District 47)
House Majority Leader David Hiott (SC House District 4)
Greenville County Legislative Delegation
Spartanburg County Legislative Delegation
Dear Sirs and Madams,
As 2025 draws near, I want to thank the Republican leaders who are honoring an issue South Carolina voters hold dear: the end of abortion and the return of responsible sexual practices and family values. Although the Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act (Act) was passed in 2023, there were still over 8,000 reported abortions in our State that year. Even more alarmingly, nearly 6,000 were drug induced1. But the Lozier Institute gave no indication how many, if any, Abortion Pills were prescribed out of state, which is illegal in South Carolina. The true number of abortions may never be known. The lack of transparency concerning drug induced abortions raises the question of how many abortions actually were performed in this State. And to emphasize this problem, the popular "morning after pill" (which is over the counter and unregulated) is actually an abortion of a zygote rather than a contraception technique as advertised. While a good start, the Act still fails to defend the unborn, and it is inadequate against the growing use of pharmaceuticals (such as the Morning After and Abortion Pills) to abort children.
The SC Republican platform, pillar II, topic Right to Life, clearly states, "We believe that the right to life is the first inalienable right, without which there can be no other rights. We believe that all human life has intrinsic worth and therefore support vigorous legal protection at all stages of life, from the unborn child to the elderly to the infirmed and disabled." The existing legislation is clearly inadequately meeting this platform, as there is still a genocide in our State.
The people of South Carolina are against abortion and reject the lies of a "risk-free sex" culture. We resent our hard earned money being taxed to not only fix the problems this false ideology has created, but to subsidize those promoting this failed experiment. We reject the idea that pre-meditated murder is health care. We will never agree that murdering one's innocent child is an expression of empowerment. We are sick of the pharmaceutical companies insisting we need even more pills to take. We are tired of being gaslighted by those causing these problems insisting that it is we who are to blame. This sentiment was clearly demonstrated in the recent primaries when Senators Katrina Shealy, Sandy Senn and Penry Gustafson were decisively defeated for their pro-abortion stances.
What we are for is education in our schools that will teach boys and girls what being responsible adults is about. We promote the economic and emotional benefits that marriage provides. We believe that the tax money spent to fix all the risk-free sex problems would be better spent in encouraging the medical community to research, improve and practice Natural Family Planning (NFP) disciplines, and to educate high schoolers on the benefits of NFP over contraception, abortion and In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Talking points on this can be found in the accompanying document, "The Natural Family Planning and Marriage Solution."
We, the undersigned, want you to know that we will not tolerate the lies, gaslighting, and fraud associated with "risk-free sex" and the "big-pharma" approach to it. We want a return to responsible and loving relationships grounded in a healthy family. We are not a movement of "no," we are a movement of "a better way for all."
We look forward to your response.
1Statistics for 2023, taken from The Lozier Institute
The Natural Family Planning and Marriage Solution
In support of the petition to the South Carolina House of Representatives concerning the ending of abortion within our State, this paper is written to address five key questions that should be focal to the discussion of pro-life legislation.
1) What Choice Does a Woman Have?
Before we even begin to discuss women's choices, note that men have been legally excluded from abortion discussion by "pro-choice" lobbyists. The whole point of Planned Parenthood and its ilk, in accordance with the vision of its founder Margaret Sanger, is to remove the need women have of men in their lives except for sexual pleasure --
"[Our objective is] unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children ... [Women must have the right] to live ... to love ... to be lazy ... to be an unmarried mother ... to create ... to destroy ... The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order ... The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."
• Margaret Sanger, italics mine
And note that the key to making a woman "free" from men is to allow the woman to be free from the risk of getting pregnant. By controlling when a woman gets pregnant, it was argued, she could compete equally with men in the work force and therefore not need subject herself to the tyranny of men. As a result, men are only viewed as biological "sex toys" with the pro-abortion lobby, and the increase in popularity of "alternative lifestyles" has reduced man's role even further. But the idea of risk-free sex was quickly proven to be the lie it always was. The percentage of children born out of wedlock in 1940 (when Planned Parenthood was just beginning to influence the culture in the United States) represented only 4% of births. Within 30 years (one generation), this number had almost quadrupled at 14%, and continued to rise at an even more rapid rate. By 2008, the percentage finally appeared to have leveled off at just over 40%!1 It is in response to this epidemic, caused by the epic failure of the risk-free sex theory, that abortion became such an attractive alternative. But even the abortion fix took over 30 years just to stabilize the problem, and came at the cost of murdering over a million children a year. The "choice" Planned Parenthood gave the woman was to be either responsible or irresponsible in her sex life. For 30 years, the choice to be irresponsible did not give her a choice from the consequences that came from believing in the lies. After Roe v Wade, Planned Parenthood was finally able to distract attention away from their false ideology by saying that abortion is the new choice. Since this choice was the woman's, men were by default excluded from the discussion. At least legally. Coercion from boyfriends, husbands and pimps has been used by pro-abortionists to show that women are still not free from the tyranny of men. Yet this tyranny that they complain about is the direct result of claiming that sex can be risk-free and that men are only there for her pleasure.
In contrast to Planned Parenthood, which only offers abortion as an alternative to a loving relationship with a man, pro-lifers seek to educate young people what a healthy marriage looks like, and the importance of respecting each gender's role in pro-creation. Within the pro-life outlook, a woman has many options available to her. By choosing to save sexual intimacy for marriage, an unmarried woman is free to choose among as many men as she desires before deciding who will be best suited for a life-long relationship. And once married, she can choose among the various Natural Family Planning (NFP) disciplines that are available, most of which are superior to artificial forms of birth control in preventing pregnancy, and are equally useful in deciding exactly when she does choose to become pregnant.
2) What Does Empowering A Woman Look Like?
Empowerment should mean one has the ability to take control of one's life. There are many ways to measure this control. Planned Parenthood only sees one way for a woman to have control: let the woman choose whether or not to have the abortion. Planned Parenthood cannot claim contraception is control, because if it worked then abortions would not be necessary. We also have to look at the price women are paying for this "choice." Chemical birth control methods have many well documented side effects; from affecting their thought process enough to cause some women to marry the wrong men, to facial hair, to suppression of pheromones that naturally attract men, to a multitude of health problems (both mental and physiological). Non-chemical contraceptives are not much better, as all of them, except for the condom, are known to cause physical damage during and even after implementation. In some cases, this damage has been fatal. Condoms, while medically "safe," are among the least effective means of birth control statistically. And this article will not elaborate on the very real matters of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and psychological problems that risk-free sex has brought about. But it should be noted that artificial birth control is related to to a massive increase in likelihood of divorce, and this will be covered in Question 4. At some point, we have to state the obvious and admit that Sanger's idea of empowerment is not only insane, but dangerous.
Pro-lifers look at other criteria to judge how women are empowered. An important one is whether or not the woman is impoverished. If one defines "wealth" as having the economic means to do what one wants to do, then empowerment is unequivocally tied to one's economic status. While there is some variation between sources and any given year that data is collected, the bottom line is the same -- married women are economically better off than unmarried ones. The percentage of married women who lived below the poverty line is normally close to 4%, while the percentage of unmarried women in poverty is typically near 35%2. Furthermore, widows are much less likely to be impoverished (typically around 16%) than those who never married (typically about 26%), and those who divorced are always somewhere between these two groups (usually around 18%)3. If empowerment is related to quality of life and economic standing, then marriage is far more empowering than the ideology of risk-free sex. Furthermore, the increase in children born to unwed mothers has resulted in a proportional demand on the welfare system, which results in ever higher taxes. Encouraging healthy marriages among women will not only empower them far more than contraception and abortion, but will empower U.S. Citizens as a whole by decreasing the need to tax them.
But the pro-life position empowers women in other ways. Most notably, NFP is neither an economic hand-out like welfare, nor a way to hide a bad mistake like abortion. Rather it is an education on how her body works. NFP teaches both men and women just how wonderfully made the female body is, which not only improves the woman's sense of self-respect (which by itself is empowering), but teaches men how to respect a woman. It also tells a woman what to look for concerning reproductive related abnormalities, and how to explain such matters to her physician. Pro-lifers hold that teaching a man to respect the female body as something other than a sex-toy, and giving a woman the vocabulary necessary to speak to doctors about their health, are self-evidently empowering activities.
3) What is the Role of Man?
As mentioned earlier, Planned Parenthood looks at men as the cause of all problems a woman has. In other words, men are oppressive. As Sanger was an avowed early 20th Century socialist, Planned Parenthood rejects the idea that men can be anything but oppressive. The idea that men can be taught to respect women, or to live up to the Christian ideal of what a husband ought to be, is inconceivable to the pro-abortion movement. It is obvious that this position has not changed. The argument that abortion is a woman's choice can only stand as long as this assumption remains in place. If Planned Parenthood were ever to accept men as being honorable beings, then they would have to abandon the "women's choice" slogan.
But chastity affects a man just as much as a woman. Once sexual intimacy enters a relationship, it has a tendency to overshadow all other aspects of the relationship. This is not a man's issue, it is a couple's issue. It is this insidious aspect of risk-free sex which makes a healthy marriage such an attractive alternative; by the time a couple decide to marry, they can do so with the knowledge and assurance that they have at least some mastery over their sexual appetites. This is in itself a form of empowerment. At the very least, the couple are looking at each other as something other than merely a sex-toy. They are encouraged to look at the other as someone they want to spend the rest of their lives with. Financial, professional, non-sexual pastimes, ambitions and goals have a chance to be discussed and experienced prior to marriage, without the distraction of sex.
After decades of vilifying the man, there will be a need to help men rediscover their manhood. Tremendous damage has been done, as shown by the fact that men are much more likely to suffer from gender dysphoria than women (depending on study, 2.5 to 5 times more likely4). For the last 80 years, our culture has actively engaged in brainwashing the ideology that all men do is get women pregnant, that there are no consequences for his actions, and that family is a woman's responsibility. This is not what defines a man. A real man is a male who takes responsibility for both his family and for the consequences of his actions. The risk-free sex culture has nearly destroyed the man in favor of keeping males in perpetual childhood. One cannot learn to be responsible if one never has to face the consequences of actions taken. Marriage and the care of family needs to reintroduced to our culture for real men to come back. Without a doubt, Christian and Jewish churches are best suited for this educational role, but there is no reason that the existing sex education classes can't be modified to include these concepts. In Question 5, I will address purely secular benefits society at large will receive. Furthermore, as NFP is so superior to any other form of sexual education, it is completely irresponsible for schools to not teach it instead of what is currently part of the curriculum. And, once taught, young men as well as young women will be shown just how wonderfully made the female body is. Consider the fact that the same vocabulary that NFP gives a woman a means to actively discuss matters with her doctor can also be a common and intimate language between a man and woman when they marry and become sexually active.
4) What Does Healthcare Look Like?
For Planned Parenthood, healthcare means keeping a woman from getting pregnant, as if that were the one and only sexually transmitted "disease" a woman could possibly have. The most definitive attribute a woman has, the ability to bring life into this world, is actively rejected by Planned Parenthood, making "her" an asexual "it." No real concern for the woman's actual health is addressed. All the harmful side effects of contraception mentioned above is their idea of "therapy" for the real "problem" of becoming pregnant. As such, it should not come as a surprise that they consider pre-meditated murder to be "healthcare." But the mockery of real healthcare goes even deeper than what is presented publicly. Chemical contraception is handed out like candy by doctors for almost every single illness associated with the reproductive system, as opposed to merely keeping a woman from becoming pregnant. But the medication does not fix the actual problem, it only hides the symptoms while creating new problems that have their own symptoms. Our current "healthcare" system has created a vicious circle where the woman gradually finds herself taking more and more medication to hide the problems the current medication is causing. Far from improving the health of the woman, she gets sicker with every new prescription.
NFP, however, looks at how a woman's body is supposed to work, and focuses on what has malfunctioned when things do not go as expected. When the woman's reproductive system is acting as it should, those knowledgeable in NFP can know with an amazing degree of certainty when the female is fertile when she is not. When the man is knowledgeable in NFP, he can participate in the discovery process, forming an intimate bond between the couple. Couples who practice NFP together comment on how it gets them to talk about issues they otherwise would not have talked about, strengthening the marriage. A study published in the Journal for Divorce and Remarriage5 established the average chance for any given couple to get divorced, and then looked at different forms of birth control to see if they impacted the odds of getting divorced. Couples who used chemical contraceptives were 54% more likely than average to get a divorce. A woman with a tubal ligation were 75% more likely to get divorced than average. When the man had a vasectomy, the couple was more than twice as likely to get divorced than average. Couples using condoms were 67% more likely to get divorced. Couples who actively used NFP were 47% less likely to get divorced, and even those who tried NFP and stopped were still 31% less likely to get divorced. Healthy marriages greatly reduce the incidence of stress related illnesses, and this in itself is a form of healthcare. Furthermore, a healthy family not only benefits both spouses, but the children as well.
But NFP healthcare extends beyond confidence in deciding when to have a child and in improving communications between spouses and healthcare providers. By knowing what is expected from a woman's body, the woman will know something is wrong when the unexpected is discovered. It can be as subtle as vaginal mucus being the wrong color, or a body temperature different than what is expected on a given day. NFP can also give a clue to the woman as to why she is not getting pregnant. And with this knowledge, remedies can be used to actually fix the problem, as opposed to merely covering up the symptoms with pills. By fixing the actual problem, NFP has a better success rate in fixing infertility than In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). IVF claims to have a "65.3% of patients, or two-thirds, have a successful outcome after six or more IVF cycles. This is especially applicable to IVF patients under the age of 40."6 (italic mine) In contrast, 87.3% of all infertility cases can be fixed without the use of IVF,7 and women can become pregnant as early as the first cycle after the therapies or procedures are completed. This is what pro-lifers call healthcare.
5) What Does the Pro-Life Vision Mean for Society at Large?
The vision explained in these talking points is that society will promote a healthy marriage in lieu of risk-free sex. This will require education, but we are not promoting an additional educational burden. We propose discarding the time proven failure of Planned Parenthood's agenda in favor of what has served man successfully since the beginning of civilization, with the additional benefits that NFP can provide. Women must learn that men are not their natural enemies, and men must learn that they have a responsibility to the women they wed and the children they father. Both must be taught that lust is not love, and that fickle emotions are a poor foundation for a lifetime of commitment. Time proven classics such as C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves ought to replace the poisonous ideas of risk-free sex. Churches need to take the lead in this, so the government should not only minimize interference in this matter, but to take steps encourage private worship. This is not a matter of church and State conflicting with each other, it is a matter of the State recognizing what is best for its citizens.
By making a healthy family the foundation of raising children, and making marriage the framework from within sexual activity is allowed, there will be a reduction of millions of impoverished single women and their children. The welfare program loads at federal, state and local levels will be massively reduced, resulting in either lower taxes on society and/or more money available for programs that benefit everyone (such as grants to further improve NFP technologies and related sciences). With the massive reduction in unwed mothers, churches and other charities will be better able to provide for impoverished families, reducing the welfare tax burden even further. Regardless, the quality of life for the tax payer will increase.
A healthy family life also produces more productive citizens. Respect for authority begins with children honoring their parents, which leads to less delinquency and crime. This will ease the strain on law enforcement and help our justice system to better function as it should. A child first learns his obligation to society at large by performing chores around the house. This improves the work ethic of the work force, and a healthy work force is what makes the country competitive world wide. The discipline parents enforce on their children teaches them that there are consequences to their actions. This is the foundation for them growing up to being responsible spouses and parents, and encourages them to avoid the false promises of consequent free behavior.
Conclusion: I want to end this paper by pointing out that this paper is not about creating a new legislative agenda, but rather as a means of accomplishing what you, as a Republican in the SC House of Representatives claim you want to accomplish. This paper, directly or indirectly, addresses all six of the 2025-2026 SC REPUBLICAN CAUCUS LEGISLATIVE AGENDA, 6 PILLARS FOR PROGRESS to some degree.
(Pillar 1) Deliver Historic Tax Cuts: By better educating young adults on a healthy marriage and promoting a strong family, not only will there be less need to raise taxes for the welfare that comes from the failed risk-free sex ideology, but less crime and a more productive work force will reduce the law enforcement tax burden while simultaneously increasing the tax base. Furthermore, such education can be done without increasing taxes simply by replacing the current but failing sex education curriculum with a family focused and NFP based one.
(Pillar 2) Promote Business-Friendly Policies: Improving the quality of the average worker by him coming from a strong family will benefit all businesses, and need not cost the tax-payer an extra penny to implement.
(Pillar 3) Fuel South Carolina's Booming Economy: This pillar specifically addresses "Reform unemployment programs to get able-bodied adults off the sideline and back in the workforce," in it's title. Reforming our sex education classes will greatly assist in this by encouraging a better work ethic in people via learning this virtue from a strong family. In other words, workers will have an inner drive to be productive members of society, something only a family can instill.
(Pillar 4) Expand Educational Opportunities: This pillar includes the phrase, "to better equip students for future success." As with Pillars 2 and 3, this can be done by encouraging a better family life, and by educating them on how to do have a better family life when they raise one.
(Pillar 5) PRIORITIZE PUBLIC SAFETY AND LAW-AND-ORDER POLICIES: While this pillar focuses mainly on punitive efforts, there are preventative benefits for promoting strong marriages and NFP. And again, no additional tax burden is necessary as existing tax expenditures can be redirected to better sex education classes. Specifically, such preventative measures will impact Bullet 1 -- "Strengthen penalties for death by fentanyl, retail theft, and juvenile crime," and Bullet 2 -- "Protect children and families from "deepfake" digital manipulation of images." By reducing the police, legal and detention demand by preventing crime in the first place, this will also impact Pillar 1.
(Pillar 6) STRENGTHEN FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES: This paper speaks most directly to three of the five bullets mentioned here. Bullet 2 -- "Defend and support pro-life and Second Amendment policies", Bullet 3 -- "Increase the rights of parents in the doctor's office and classroom" and Bullet 4 -- "Reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies and consolidate the state's fragmented public health system."
This is what you, as Republicans in the SC House of Representatives, claim you want to do. We are only requesting that you honor your own agenda, and to consider strong marriages and NFP as a common sense means to accomplish your stated goals. Thank you for your time.
Original Publication Date: 15 May 2025