Husker heroes

As Christmas approaches, we Christians remember daily the colossal effect one young woman’s unplanned pregnancy had on the course of human history—not to mention our salvation.

It’s perhaps the chief reason among many why I find the pro-life advocacy of six female University of Nebraska athletes worth celebrating.

Rebekah Allick, a 6-foot-4 junior middle blocker for the Cornhuskers’ nationally ranked women’s volleyball team, and softball players Jordyn Bahl, Hannah Camenzind, Lauren Camenzind, Abbie Squier, and Malia Thoms are all Nebraskans and appeared in a television commercial about the two abortion-related state ballot measures in this year’s election. They called on fellow Nebraskans to support Initiative 434, which would have amended the Nebraska Constitution to prohibit abortion after the first trimester with limited exceptions, and against Initiative 439, which would only have prohibited abortion after “fetal viability.”

And voters listened, adopting Initiative 434 and rejecting Initiative 439. By that standard, the athletes’ advocacy was successful.

Best of all, Bahl, a star pitcher who led the University of Oklahoma’s softball team to two national championships before returning home to play for her home state’s flagship university, declared that the athletes weren’t paid to appear in the ad. “None of us received a penny!” Bahl wrote on X. “We just aren’t afraid to take a stand and protect life!”

When the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, the controversial, often-challenged decision that declared that women have a constitutional right to abort their children more than 50 years ago, the high court drew backlash from prominent female athletes and women’s professional sports organizations. Some high-profile male athletes spoke out against the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as well—most notably Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrows, who opened his pro-abortion Instagram screed by declaring, “I’m not pro-murdering babies.”

Not many sports figures, however, have used their platforms to advance the pro-life cause. Even fewer, from what I’ve seen, have been women. And whenever a male athlete is brave enough to stand up for the unborn, as Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker did earlier this year, voices on the left immediately bark that his lack of a uterus disqualifies him from opining on the matter.

That argument doesn’t fly with me for multiple reasons. One of them is that men who espouse the opposite viewpoint aren’t told to pipe down—in fact, they’re hailed as allies whose views are more enlightened than those of oppressive knuckle-draggers who supposedly want to control women’s bodies. More importantly, though, the loudest pro-abortion voices on the left seem intent on shouting down women who disagree with them, too.

This is why the decision of these female Cornhuskers to take a stand for the unborn is, in my view, an act of courage. I can name several men associated with the football world—coaches Jim Harbaugh and Tony Dungy, Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback Tim Tebow, longtime NFL tight end Benjamin Watson, and former Philadelphia Eagles free safety Chris Maragos among them—“open [their] mouths for the speechless, in the cause of all who are appointed to die” (Proverbs 31:8). That’s not to say there shouldn’t be more male athletes from football or other sports doing the same. But it’s female athletes’ voices I haven’t heard much and would like to hear more of.

I can’t help but think of the sad tale of Cherica Adams, whose former Carolina Panthers boyfriend, Rae Carruth, spent 17 years in prison for brutally murdering her when she wouldn’t abort their child. (Their son, Chancellor Lee Adams, survived and lives with cerebral palsy.) Adams surely isn’t the first woman to suffer such a horrific fate at the hands of a man who didn’t want to pay child support. If it’s all about “choice,” where is the outpouring of support for women like Adams who chose life?

Allick spoke up for such women in the commercial: “434 defends women from abuse, sex trafficking, and coercion,” the volleyball player declared while wearing a red T-shirt prominently featuring a cross.

I also can’t help but think of athletes like former U.S. track star Sanya Richards-Ross. In her 2017 book, Chasing Grace, the four-time gold medalist confessed to aborting her unborn child just weeks before running in the 2008 Summer Olympics in China.

More than that, though, Richards-Ross wrote, “I literally don’t know another track-and-field athlete who hasn’t had an abortion, and that’s sad.” Female athletes should know that even though motherhood may require them to put their athletic plans on hold temporarily and schedule training and/or school around parenting duties when they do pick up a ball or start running again, it doesn’t have to derail their athletic dreams entirely. Having written multiple stories about college basketball players and even high school soccer players who played interscholastic sports after giving birth, I know this for a fact.

In the commercial, Bahl pounds her softball glove and says, “Nebraska, it’s time to get off the bench.” I’d say it’s high time Christian college and pro athletes—both male and female—answered that call when it comes to fighting the scourge that is abortion.

Unborn lives depend on it.