Rep. Marlin Stutzman: I was almost aborted

• Tweet

U.S. House Representative from Indiana, Martin Stutzman, wrote an op-ed pice for The Washington Times in which he revealed his mother nearly terminated her pregnancy.

Stutzman says he was discussing the murder trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell with his mother when she divulged the circumstances of his birth.

His mother became pregnant at age 17, right after her home had burned to the ground. She said she was planning to drive 40 miles to Kalamazoo, Michigan, to “take care of her situation.”

"If she had gone to Kalamazoo that night, you wouldn't be reading this today," Stutzman wrote. "I would have been aborted."

"I had to think, 'What if a "Gosnell" clinic was only four miles away instead of 40?'" he wrote.

Joining other Republican lawmakers in the wake of the gruesome Gosnell trial, Stutzman called for an "honest" conversation about abortion that doesn't resort to "euphemisms like 'choice.'"

Gosnell is accused of killing one woman and several infants that were born alive after failed abortion procedures. He ran a clinic that a criminal grand jury report compared to a "baby charnel house."

Abortion rights supporters have denounced Gosnell as a product of limited access to healthcare and arbitrarily strict abortion regulations.

"Kermit Gosnell, like every other abortionist in this country, sold lies to young women like my mother. Two years after Roe v. Wade, my young parents made the incredibly difficult decision to reject those lies and protect my life," Stutzman wrote.