‘She protected that life’

TRL keynote speaker gives thanks to mother for saving her from abortion

By Dan McWilliams

Kathy Barnette, keynote speaker for the Celebrate Life Banquet sponsored by the Knox County chapter of Tennessee Right to Life, frequently said her remarks were addressed to “the adults in the room,” comparing them to the adults in her mother’s life who fought to save her from abortion after she was conceived as a result of rape.

The annual banquet was held Oct. 15 at Bridgewater Place in Knoxville and was attended by 400 supporters of the sanctity of life. The event had a strong Catholic presence, with Bishop Mark Beckman giving the invocation; two parishioners of Holy Ghost in Knoxville, TRL state president Stacy Dunn, who offered remarks, and Knox County chapter executive director Angel Brewer, who emceed; Will Brewer, a parishioner of St. John Neumann in Farragut, the state TRL’s legal counsel and legislative liaison, who provided a legislative update; and the Diocese of Knoxville, area parishes, and several East Tennessee Catholics serving as sponsors.

Also taking the microphone were Carol Zimmerman, who has served as president of the board of the Knox County TRL chapter; the TRL youth oratory contest winner, Ilse Dale, who was recognized alongside the organization’s youth art contest winner, Olivia Turner; national anthem singer Tomi Robb; and pastor Clayton Wood of Lonsdale Community Church, who led the closing prayer.

Mrs. Zimmerman welcomed the large gathering at the banquet after dinner and drew applause with her first remark about the state being a leader in the pro-life cause.

“We rejoice with you that Tennessee is now a safe place for the unborn,” she said. “All praise to God that more babies are alive, and mothers are safe from the pain and the devastation of abortion.”

Mrs. Brewer presented Bishop Beckman with a gift of an angel made out of wood by TRL supporter Jim Flood, who is a member of All Saints Parish.

Giving thanks for life

In his invocation, the bishop prayed, “O God, who has formed each of us in the womb of our mother and shaped us from the clay of the earth and breathed into our nostrils the breath of life: thank you, Lord, for the gift of our life. We ask Your blessings upon us as we gather tonight, Lord. Help us, Lord, to be diligent and caring for each and every human life created in Your image and likeness, from the moment of conception until natural death. May we build a world, Lord, of greater respect for human life, for the dignity of every human person. Inspire us, Lord, with actions of compassion and justice and deep abiding care and love. All of this we ask in the name of Jesus, the Lord. Amen.”

Mr. Brewer introduced a number of legislators attending the banquet, including Anderson County Mayor Terry Frank, Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs, state Reps. Jason Zachary and Michele Carringer, former state Rep. Pete Drew, former state Rep. and interim speaker of the House Bill Dunn, former state Rep. Jimmy Matlock, Town of Farragut Mayor Ron Williams, and state Rep. Elaine Davis.

Mrs. Brewer recognized clergy as well as the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia Congregation who were attending.

“Without the church leaders, we would be nowhere,” she said. “In 2014, when we passed Amendment 1”—an amendment to the Tennessee Constitution that ensures the Constitution will not support, fund, or protect the right to abortion—“even the opposition the next day were chastising each other for losing, and they said we won by going into the churches, into the small counties and the rural areas, so we can’t do any of this without the church because we all know that the center of all of this is God. It’s a spiritual matter, so we thank you all very much.”

Mrs. Brewer introduced Miss Turner, whose winning artwork was on display, and Miss Dale, a 2024 Knoxville Catholic High School graduate who delivered her winning speech. Miss Dale won the local chapter’s oratory contest and placed second in the state. Her theme was “What are we afraid of?”

“We have been afraid of things from a very young age. When I was 5 years old, I was afraid of heights and spiders and vampires, but today I want to ask my fellow teenagers and young adults: what are we afraid of?” she said. “Even though Tennessee is now one of the most pro-life states in America, thanks to Tennessee Right to Life, my experience is that teenagers are afraid to speak about the heavy realities surrounding abortion. Worse, they are afraid to even examine the realities.”

Miss Dale spoke of the origins of Planned Parenthood, founded by Margaret Sanger based on eugenics.

“My fellow teenagers think abortion is noble, but it was founded on racism. How many teenagers know this?” Miss Dale said. “The racist dislike of so-called less-important people has now evolved into an over-arching hatred of the ultimate unimportant person: the unborn, unseen child.”

Miss Dale received a standing ovation after her speech.

Mrs. Dunn spoke next and quipped, “I don’t want to follow that.”

The TRL president talked about the state of life issues in the nation. One side of the aisle has attempted to turn the nation’s emergency rooms into abortion providers, succeeded in making VA hospitals immune to state laws, allowed the Department of Defense to pay to abort children of military personnel, and suspended FDA safeguards on abortion chemicals, allowing them to be dispensed by pharmacists and sent through the mail.

“Sadly, not all the attacks have come from pro-abortion Democrats,” Mrs. Dunn said. “Earlier this year at the Republican National Convention, the longstanding pro-life plank of the Republican Party was significantly weakened. The platform meeting that took place in Milwaukee back in July was by all accounts a sham. Everything had already been decided by the time the delegates got there. The proposed language was introduced, no discussion was allowed, and within 15 minutes it was all said and done.

“Years of hard-fought victories were removed just like that. The statement that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life and support for a human-life amendment to the Constitution: gone. The opposition of using tax dollars to fund or promote aborting children or to fund organizations like Planned Parenthood: gone. The opposition to infanticide and support of the Born-Alive victims act, which would require that babies born alive after an attempted abortion be cared for—that language is gone as well. The plank was reduced to a statement about how the states are now free to pass laws to protect life. Late-term abortions are opposed. Support for prenatal care, contraception, and IVF are mentioned. That’s it: four measly sentences.”

The miracle of Roe v. Wade being overturned “changed everything,” Mrs. Dunn said.

“The pro-abortion forces went crazy, and they immediately went on the offensive,” she added.

Tennessee: A pro-life state

Mr. Brewer thanked the “staunchly pro-life legislators who attended” as he began his update.

“Here we are in Tennessee. We have the strongest pro-life law in the country that continues to remain in effect today despite the other side’s strong opposition to it both politically and legally,” he said. “It is because of that law that pro-abortion statistic websites estimate that there are over 1,000 less abortions in the state of Tennessee, and that the birth rate in Tennessee has increased 3 percent since 2022. And if you think that that is difficult, Tennessee and North Dakota are the only states in the country where the birth rate has increased at all. Every other state has decreased.”

Mr. Brewer said that the Human Life Protection Act that passed in Tennessee in 2019 “immediately went into effect as soon as Roe v. Wade was overturned. Our attorney general was legislatively given the authority to determine that Roe v. Wade had been overturned and that Tennessee could ban abortion at all stages of gestation. That is still in effect today—both medical abortions and surgical abortions are not happening in the state of Tennessee, at least they’re not happening legally, and so thank God for that.”

Mr. Brewer acknowledged Rep. Zachary’s abortion-trafficking law, which required parents of children who wanted to travel out of state to have an abortion to give their written consent, “the same parents who have to give written consent for their child to get a Tylenol in their elementary-school clinic have to also give consent for their child to get an abortion.”

“But, boy oh boy, such a simple law—how could anybody oppose?—was the hot-topic item in the media and the legislature,” Mr. Brewer said, asking “How many calls did you get, Rep. Zachary, on that law?” and getting the reply, “Thousands, and I’m sure they were very friendly and kind. Although it passed, it received much scrutiny from fellow legislators; it received much scrutiny from the media; and state Rep. Aftyn Behn from Nashville sued the state of Tennessee over the law, claiming that it was a violation of counselors’, clergy’s, and psychiatrists’ free speech for them not to be able to advise their minor clients and parishioners and congregants on how to get an abortion in another state.

“So, she took this lawsuit to court, and so far she has won: this law is currently enjoined from going into effect. I anticipate that as it makes it way up to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, that will be overturned, and it will come back into effect, but that is just to say the battle is not over. Such a simple law that is parental consent has been enjoined, and so we continue to fight the battles both in the legislature and the courts.”

Mr. Brewer said the state legislature passed a bill this year called the Baby Olivia Act.

“The nonprofit organization Live Action, who does a lot of good pro-life work, has created a cartoon video of a baby in utero through each stage of gestation. The legislature passed a law that requires any public school in Tennessee that already has an existing family-life curriculum to show that video or one just like it to its students when teaching sex ed in their schools.”

The Human Life Protection Act, the state’s universal abortion ban, has also been litigated over, Mr. Brewer noted.

The Susan B. Anthony List, one of the largest and most influential pro-life groups in the country and which “certainly has a lot of sway on Capitol Hill, has deemed it fit to create a public-relations campaign and named Tennessee as the most pro-life state in the country,” Mr. Brewer said. “They want to take what Tennessee has done and model it to the other states in the country to say, ‘Marching on this issue is not always a bad thing. It’s not always a detractor of votes. It’s not always a detractor of public interest. Here is what Tennessee has done. Here are the lives that Tennessee has saved. Here’s how you can do it, too.’”

Before introducing Mrs. Barnette, Mrs. Brewer talked about the state TRL’s Choose Life license plates, which, according to a U.S. Army training course this year, constituted a driver with the plate as a “domestic terrorist.”

“Tennessee Right to Life sponsored the license plate and defended it in court when it was challenged. … That Choose Life license plate is actually doing so much good because every year it generates over $100,000. It comes back to the Tennessee Right to Life Education Fund, and then the Education Fund is able to disburse it out to the pregnancy-resource centers, so it’s doing a lot of good. In fact, Stacy and her team just last month gave $5,000 each to the four pregnancy-resource centers that were affected in flood-ravaged upper East Tennessee,” Mrs. Brewer said.

Mrs. Brewer remembered Dennis Williams, a TRL board member who died on Sept. 13. She also mentioned a piece of property donated to the Knox County chapter that is next to Planned Parenthood’s recently reopened facility in East Knoxville. The property has been developed into a prayer garden.

“That’s just a miracle of God that we couldn’t have planned on,” Mrs. Brewer said before concluding: “I just wanted to reassure you that no matter who is in the White House in January or in four years or in 24 years, it doesn’t matter because we know who is on the throne. God is on the throne. It is His battle that we are fighting, and we know that He is on our side, that we are walking with Him. We’ve read the Book, and we know how it ends, and God wins.”

She is exceptional

Mrs. Barnette’s keynote was titled “I Am the Exception,” and gratitude was a major theme of her talk. She is a former national grassroots director and senior adviser to Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign and now founder and president of Being Better America Strategies. She is the host of the Kathy Barnette podcast as well as an author, a veteran of the U.S. Army Reserves, a former adjunct professor in corporate finance, a wife, a homeschooling mom, and a 2022 candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. Her first book, Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain: Being Black and Conservative in America, went to No. 1 on Amazon.

Mrs. Barnette grew up in poverty on a pig farm in southern Alabama and was raised in a home with no insulation or running water that had an outhouse and a well.

Her mother was raped at age 11 and gave birth to her at age 12.

“That is my story, and yet I am crying because it is a very real part of who I am and my identity. I look at that story and I think about my mom, and I think about my children, and I think about my husband—we just celebrated 23 years of marriage,” she said. “I’m so grateful to you, God. I’m so grateful to our God. He saw value in my life, and by the grace of God the adults in the room saw value in my life. I am eternally grateful for that. I offer no apologies that I am here. I am grateful, so very grateful.”

Her husband and two “amazing children” would not have been possible had not “the adults in the room,” who included her grandparents, “not seen value in my life, had they seen an inconvenience, something to be shunned, something hopeless, full of despair.”

“Aborting me would have destroyed everything that has come as a result of me and my presence in this world. Aborting me would not have resolved the real wrong that had been inflicted upon my mom, and there was a wrong that had been inflicted upon her. My mother has suffered the consequence. . . . As you can imagine, when something so horrible is inflicted upon a little child, the trajectory of their life shifts, and the hurt and the harm and the shame and all that you have to live through—aborting me would not have corrected that wrong.”

Some people may see hopelessness in her beginnings, Mrs. Barnette said.

“But I see purpose because God sees purpose. God said before the foundation of the world, ‘I saw you, Kathy. I chose you, I set you apart for Me, and at the right time I will call you,’ and He did. Where some see despair, I see hope,” she added.

Mrs. Barnette remembered her grandparents fondly despite the poverty she grew up in.

“We were so poor, we couldn’t afford the other ‘o’—we were just po’. But when you’re a child and you’re loved, and I had everything—I had no idea. I was loved, and I was protected. I don’t recall one time anyone looking at me and calling me a victim. … I remember being loved. I remember feeling protected. I remember running around until the lights came on—there was only one, but it was there. I remember that, and I’m so grateful for that beginning because no one told me that I was a victim and all the odds were against me.”

Mrs. Barnette didn’t plan on homeschooling her children until her daughter “came home, and they were going to be teaching her about same-sex marriage: she was 5 years old. My husband and I made a choice that I would step out of the corporate race and stay home, and let me tell you, I’m so grateful to God that somehow He planted a seed. I was one of those moms who looked forward to that little yellow bus driving off so I could get back to my own life. I had plans, but I am so grateful to God that He has a way of interrupting our plans, and now my babies are 18—my son just graduated from high school and is now in college, and my daughter is 15—I’m so grateful to God that when they were so little in kindergarten and up that He interrupted my own plans and showed me something more precious. I wish I could give up 10 of my future years to go back 10 years and do it again. That’s how precious it is, if that helps anyone in the room. I pray that it does.”

The keynote speaker said she has “lived a full life, an adventurous life—traveled the world, done so many different things, had so many experiences, but above all I’ve been able to live, and that I am eternally grateful for, that I was not the exception to the rule to my grandparents. Instead, it was life. My grandmother—I never saw her read anything, so I don’t know if she cannot read…but she was smart enough to know that what was growing in my mother’s womb was life, and she protected that life.”