“Can you overcome this aggravated assault by killing a baby?” she said in an interview with The Post. “The United States Supreme Court has said that in a case of aggravated rape, capital punishment is cruel and unusual punishment. Then why would you want to visit that punishment on a pre-born child?”
The March for Life celebrated a significant victory with the passage in 1977 of the Hyde amendment, which banned federal funding for abortions. But Miss Gray regarded the victory as incomplete, arguing that it ultimately suggested that “killing babies is all right if you have the money to pay for it.”
(Larry Morris/THE WASHINGTON POST) - Nellie Gray speaks at a rally on the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 22, 1993.
Nellie Jane Gray was born June 25, 1924, in Big Spring, Tex., the daughter of a mechanic and a homemaker. She was baptized into the Catholic Church and cited her faith as a “very strong influence” in her life.
After serving in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II, she received a bachelor’s degree in business from what is now Texas Woman’s University. She attended Georgetown University at night and received a law degree in 1959.
Miss Gray told The Post that she first encountered the concept of abortion while reading “The Cardinal,” Henry Morton Robinson’s best-selling 1950 novel about a fast-rising Roman Catholic priest. The narrative describes a procedure known today as a late-term abortion, in which a baby is partially delivered before its skull is crushed to facilitate its removal.
“The whole notion of that grabbed in my gut,” Miss Gray told The Post.
In 1970, as the women’s liberation movement gathered strength, Miss Gray attended a hearing on regulations for D.C. abortion clinics. She said she was “appalled that you actually had people telling a government body that you need regulations for killing babies.”
Miss Gray worked primarily for the State Department, where she did economic research, and later in the Labor Department’s legislative division. She was single and had no children or immediate survivors.
“You establish a principle that it is wrong to kill an innocent human being,” she once told The Post, “and you stick with it.”
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