Due the circumstances of her birth, Jessen has what she calls the “gift” of cerebral palsy. Despite doctors believing that she would be unable to ever walk or hold her head up, Jessen has completed two marathons and will be climbing a mountain in Italy.
She said that she does not consider herself to be a victim, and finds her strength in her faith in Jesus Christ.
Jessen said she was “grateful” for her life, and “absolutely horrified” by what was going on in the United States. She credited the growing legal push for late-term abortion to a culture that has rejected God and does not understand the inherent worth of human life.
“I think that is a fundamental issue in the culture now: is that nobody knows why they are valuable. Because there’s no longer any God to honor,” said Jessen.
Unlike the president and several of her co-panelists, Jessen placed blame on both major political parties for the status quo on life issues in the United States.
“We have some bloodthirsty Democrats and leftists, and apathetic Christians and conservatives,” said Jessen, theorizing that because “many, many, many” conservative women had themselves suffered through abortions, they found it difficult to speak for fear of offending others.
“We reap the consequences,” Jessen said, of four decades of legal abortion - including a wider media which portrays pro-life Americans as beyond the mainstream of public opinion.
To this point, Rose noted that “a lot of people who are pro-choice want abortion restricted,” and pointed to recent polling that showed the number of Americans identifying as pro-life had jumped by nine points over a single month.
“When people actually learn these facts, when they learn what abortion actually does to that child,” minds change on the issue, Rose explained.
Rose also said that children are naturally pro-life, and that people “are not made to look at a new life as a negative thing, but as a gift.”
Life, she said, should be viewed as “an opportunity, not as a threat.”
