Conservative Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey recently interviewed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 former presidential campaign running mate, Nicole Shanahan, who openly shared about her decision to be baptized as a born-again Christian the day before inauguration day, January 19, 2025. She shared the moving story of her faith journey on X last month, and described how she and her partner suffered the harrowing loss of their preborn child at 20 weeks while on the campaign trail.
In her X testimony, she stated:
For those who are searching, who feel the same longing I once did, I can only say this: keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. Faith is not about having all the answers but about trusting in the One who does. And when you find Him, you will know you are finally home.
In Shanahan’s interview with Stuckey, just after the 30-minute mark, the two women begin to discuss how Shanahan’s views on abortion began to change along her faith journey.
What does ‘pro-choice’ really mean?
“I was such a Planned Parenthood freedom of choice maximalist. Prior to joining politics, I couldn’t see anything negative to Planned Parenthood and what it represented,” Shanahan said. “Since I was a little girl, the women’s movement was always around abortion and the freedom to choose and bodily autonomy. Even months in, I couldn’t imagine ever being pro-life or understanding the pro-life perspective.”
But certain powerful experiences Shanahan had on the campaign trail opened her eyes to the truth.
Shanahan told Stuckey:
We had Angela Stanton King, a Black woman who lives in Georgia, and… Angela comes to me, and of course, I’m like, “Yes! What do you need me to do? I’ll do anything.” We had her working on Black voter outreach, and she said, “We are going to Texas, and we are going to a maternity home to meet the babies that were saved from abortion—the Black babies.”
And I said, “Yes, okay, let’s do it.” It was my first time going to such a home, and I got to hold this little baby boy, the cutest guy ever. I just held him and thought, “I love this child so much.” It wasn’t political; I was just holding this child, wondering why it got so political.
I paused and realized that I put all this time into helping people get abortions, and I hadn’t helped a single mother keep her baby. How did I miss that in all my philanthropic work with the Black community?
This, Shanahan said, was the first time she had ever questioned what being “pro-choice” should mean.
“Isn’t pro-choice about equally dividing funds between the choice to keep your child and the choice not to?” she said. “Why was I treating pro-choice as only about abortion?”
She added, “If your version of pro-choice is solely focused on abortion and not on a mother’s choice to keep her baby due to economic reasons, then you’re being programmed by something dark.”
More of this “darkness” became evident to her when she “started seeing the celebrations of abortion, that it was being celebrated — and even… my campaign partner Bobby Kennedy is like, ‘every abortion is a tragedy’ and then you see these women celebrating abortion, and not a tear.”
“And I found that to be very confusing,” Shanahan said. “And then I looked a little deeper at it… I could just see through critical thinking, there’s something wrong here. There is something fundamentally anti-human and wrong about celebrating abortions. It’s disgusting.”
Stuckey noted, “If you want to look at who truly gives women a real choice, it’s the pro-life side that says, ‘Hey, you can do this. We will be here for you.’ It really is a light versus darkness issue. The pro-abortion side uses euphemisms to trap you into believing their side.”
Eugenics and IVF
Shanahan agreed, adding that Stuckey’s book helped to open her eyes to the abortion industry’s eugenic history. She said she has additional “moral concerns” regarding how CRISPR technology is used to edit human genes, including during the IVF process.
“Initially, I thought CRISPR was amazing, but I realized there was more happening, especially through my work in women’s reproductive longevity,” said Shanahan. “I put $100 million into women’s reproductive longevity, which didn’t exist until I came along,” clarifying that ‘reproductive longevity’ means “the ability for healthy women to have babies later in life.”
“We now have women in their 20s and 30s facing fertility issues and more women wanting to have babies in their early 40s who are told they can’t,” she said. “… I wanted to fund science to address the underlying health issues that often lead to infertility. You’d think feminists would support this, but many now focus on IVF, which leads to artificial zygote creation and editing — essentially, it’s eugenics.”
She added, “… [I]t is an ethical responsibility for those in science and public health to understand this risk and the health risks IVF poses to women… The IVF industry sells it like it’s risk-free, but it’s not…. [T]hey can harvest too many eggs, leading to serious complications. Many women aren’t told about the existence of leftover embryos and the implications of that.”
Stuckey replied, “There are millions of frozen embryos on ice, and no one knows what’s going to happen to them.”
“It highlights how progressives often disconnect science from issues like gender and reproduction while labeling conservatives as anti-science,” said Shanahan. “[P]rogressives’ empathy is being used for a dark agenda, and they don’t even see it.”
