Pro-life advocate Jean Garton dies

Jean Garton, founder of Lutherans for Life and author of Who Broke the Baby?, died Dec. 23 in Benton, Ark. She was 87.

Garton, a lecturer and author with a 47-year career in pro-life advocacy, was born March 4, 1929, in Brooklyn, N.Y. A self-described “pro-life convert,” Garton joined an abortion-rights group in 1969 when she found herself pregnant at 40. She and her husband already had three children, and she did not want another.

“The ‘practical solution’ was an abortion,” Garton wrote for National Right to Life News today. “However, where I lived the state law prohibited abortion, so I joined an abortion-rights group to help change the law. What changed, however, was me. That ‘unwanted pregnancy’ became a very wanted child.”

While pregnant, Garton spent six months studying the abortion issue in-depth, trying to defend what advocates claimed: Abortion helps women, doesn’t end a human life, and is a choice God allows.

“I came out the end of that exhaustive research with a changed heart and mind and with a commitment to be a voice in defense of the unseen, unheard, unborn child,” Garton wrote in Lutheran Women’s Quarterly in 2007.

Garton went on to co-found Lutherans for Life in 1978 and served as its national president for 17 years. Her well-known book, Who Broke the Baby?, an effort to deflate popular pro-abortion rhetoric, was published in 1979 and is now in its third edition. Garton hosted a daily radio program, Speaking of Life, for five years. She also testified before Congress and was a frequent guest of Focus on the Family with James Dobson.

In a speech at the National Right to Life prayer breakfast in July, she reflected on a question she had been asked: “Why do you do what you do?” She answered, “I do what I do because I cannot not do it. … I learned from Jesus that Christianity is not a spectator sport.”

Garton and her late husband, Horace “Chic” Garton, were married for 61 years and had four children, seven grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. She died due to a brief illness. A memorial service will be held for her in mid-January.