It's time the public knows the truth about the bizarre pattern of falsehoods about MCCL from state Sen. Nathan Wesenberg

You might have seen attacks recently against Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) on social media. You deserve to know not the gossip, but the truth.

What made a state senator attack MCCL so viciously?

It seems from things he’s said and written that Sen. Nathan Wesenberg’s hostility to MCCL stems from recent elections when MCCL corrected false statements designed to hurt some of the strongest defenders of Life in the state legislature. The false attacks were made by disgruntled Republicans to help challengers defeat pro-life incumbents in primary elections. Chief among these attacks were accusations that good pro-life candidates had allegedly cast votes that caused or continued abortion funding in Minnesota’s Medicaid program. However, pro-lifers know abortion funding in Minnesota was caused by a 1995 state Supreme Court decision, Doe v. Gomez, not by any legislative vote. Minnesota courts have even shown that they will force the state to pay for Medicaid using other resources — federal grant money, state income from fees and licenses, etc. — even if the legislature doesn’t vote to fund Medicaid and its abortions. 

At least two of the candidates MCCL defended (because they had never cast votes that caused abortion funding) were elected officials that Sen. Wesenberg has shown a particular hostility toward. When MCCL was effective in defending the pro-life elected officials that Wesenberg wished to see defeated, he turned that hostility against MCCL itself. He specifically mentioned the issue of abortion funding in a meeting in which his hostility to MCCL first became apparent.

MCCL was right to not let untruths be cynically used against some of the best defenders of Life in the legislature

Only MCCL’s aggressive defense of the truth saved some of those pro-life legislators from being defeated in their primary elections.

But that clearly didn’t sit well with Sen. Wesenberg.

In 2023, Sen. Wesenberg manufactured his precept for launching increasingly bizarre attacks against MCCL — the claim that MCCL somehow “doesn’t support life at conception,” an outlandish claim against a pro-life group and its members who work to protect human life from conception to natural death.

Just before the PRO Act — the bill in 2023 that legalized abortion up to birth — was to be voted on, many Republican state senators had a strategy that MCCL agreed with to load the bill up with amendments to make pro-abortion senators show how extreme the bill was — for example, offering amendments against late-term abortions, against partial-birth abortions, to protect against abortions when an unborn baby can feel pain, etc. That strategy to put pro-abortion senators on the defensive would make them either vote to protect those unborn babies or show their true colors and have to face the voters knowing they had voted for unlimited abortion.

It should be pointed out that MCCL used this exact strategy in the 2024 elections for state House — we used the extreme votes of pro-abortion House Democrats in TV ads, and data shows MCCL's PAC turned as many as five state House races in favor of pro-life Republicans. Without that strategy, the pro-abortion trifecta in the House, Senate, and governorship would have continued to this day.

That strategy works.

Before the PRO Act vote, several state senators told MCCL that one freshman senator, Nathan Wesenberg, was planning an amendment that might undermine the strategy of painting the pro-abortion Senate in the other party as the extremists. We didn’t know the wording of the amendment, but we were told it had to do with life beginning at conception. There is a time and place for such an amendment (see below that MCCL has already passed laws that recognize that life begins at conception and which remain in state statues because MCCL has continued to fight for them), but an honest discussion about whether such an amendment that couldn’t pass and might only be used against pro-life Republicans in the way the issue was used successfully against them in the 2022 elections was certainly worth having.  

So MCCL met with Sen. Wesenberg, shared that there was a strategy to paint the pro-abortion senators as extreme and that a life at conception amendment that couldn’t be passed anyway at that point might be used instead to defeat pro-life senators. Sen. Wesenberg got upset and kicked the MCCL representative out of his office, ending communication. MCCL wasn’t even given the opportunity to share that life at conception statements were already in Minnesota statute and that the language in both bills had been drafted by MCCL itself.

Sen. Wesenberg has a right to disagree with our approach. He has a right to disagree with a strategy if he wishes, even if it is proven to have worked. But the untruths he then plastered all over social media for the next 3-plus years to discredit an organization are not only deeply unethical, but they can harm the cause of the unborn.

And to show that MCCL’s concern about a trap where pro-abortion senators would use a sweeping pro-life amendment against pro-lifers was a valid concern, pro-abortion Sen. Nicole Mitchell did almost precisely that on the Senate floor during the PRO Act. When a pro-life amendment was offered to the PRO Act to protect unborn babies with disabilities, Sen. Mitchell moved to amend the amendment with a ban on abortions at 6 weeks. She obviously didn’t want that to become law, but she wanted to force pro-lifers to vote on something that could be used against them in the next election, just what we had tried to warn Sen. Wesenberg about.

As you’ll see below, Senator Wesenberg’s posts about Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life would be laughable, except that harming the reputation of the state’s largest pro-life organization also risks harming the unborn themselves.

His false claims fall into three increasingly bizarre areas:

1. “MCCL does not believe life begins at conception” and “they want to kill babies”

2. “MCCL thinks we should have taxpayer funded abortions”

3. “MCCL thinks raping children is okay”

False claim 1: MCCL doesn't believe life begins at conception

The recognition that Life begins at conception is already in Minnesota statutes because MCCL drafted and passed two bills that recognize that fact (see the citations below). Sen. Wesenberg apparently doesn’t even know MCCL drafted and helped pass these laws, but he would have learned it if he hadn’t cut off communication with us; nevertheless he continues the ridiculous claim that MCCL “doesn’t believe that life begins at conception.”

For example:

"I was the only senator and politician in the history of Minnesota to bring life at conception as a bill or an amendment.” 

(Facebook video from Senator Nathan Wesenberg, July 5, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18uDSNAS4Z/)

"MCCL says I'm a bad person because I believe life begins at conception. So MCCL does not believe life begins at conception, they think that's extreme ... Life at conception is too extreme for MCCL, they don't believe in that. The Republican Party platform doesn't believe in that; the Republican Party platform says life begins at conception.” 

(Facebook video from Senator Nathan Wesenberg, July 5, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18uDSNAS4Z/)

"I’m going to include the email that they sent to Republicans when we were taking on this bill that shows that MCCL’s lying, and that they actually oppose life at conception. They don’t support it, they oppose it. ... 'Minnesota Concerned Citizens for Life did not oppose House File 5084. Instead, they strongly support it.' ... That’s what apparently Don Parker is sending people ... and I’m just sharing it with you. That's a lie. ... They’re lying. They’re literally lying to you. They sent emails to Republicans, the Republican House members saying that we can’t do this, that life at conception is extreme. I’m going to put both of those screenshots in the comments and you can see for yourself that MCCL’s lying and they want to kill babies.”

(Facebook video from Nathan Wesenberg for Senate, July 7, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1D68iqwExX/)

Now the truth: MCCL never sent anything claiming to have supported HF 5084, a bill that Sen. Wesenberg co-sponsored, but which would have inadvertently allowed virtually all abortions. The graphic Sen. Wesenberg shows that claimed MCCL at first supported that bill was not from MCCL — it was generated by AI, artificial intelligence! MCCL opposed the bill from the beginning because the poorly written health exception in it would have allowed nearly all abortions. MCCL of course believes as strongly as anyone that Life begins at conception. It is scientific truth. And MCCL drafted the Human Conceptus Act in 1973 that protects human beings from conception against being used in scientific experiments, and it is still law.

The Human Conceptus Act (1973, SF 1004): revisor.mn.gov/laws/1973/0/Session+Law/Chapter/562/pdf/

“Subd. 2. HUMAN CONCEPTUS. 'Human conceptus' means any human organism, conceived either in the human body or produced in an artificial environment other than the human body, from fertilization through the first 265 days thereafter. Subd. 3. LIVING. 'Living', as defined for the sole purpose of this act, means the presence of evidence of life, such as movement, heart or respiratory activity, the presence of electroencephalographic or electrocardiographic activity.”

MCCL also drafted the law that says if you harm an unborn child, at any age from conception, while committing a crime against a mother, it is a crime against two people — two victims, not one.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act (1986, HF 1844): https://www.revisor.mn.gov/laws/1986/0/388/#laws.0.6.0

"Sec. 5.  [609.266] [DEFINITIONS.] The definitions in this subdivision apply to sections 3, 4, and 6 to 14: (a) "Unborn child" means the unborn offspring of a human being conceived, but not yet born."

Further, Sen. Wesenberg can state that the Republican platform says Life begins at conception because MCCL, through its Republican Pro-life Caucus, fought for years against pro-abortion Republicans to keep the platform plank that says Life begins at conception. That statement was lost in the national Republican platform but remains in the Minnesota platform because MCCL fought for it so hard in the early days when pro-life and pro-abortion forces were more evenly divided in the state GOP.

False claim 2: MCCL supports taxpayer funding of abortion

"MCCL thinks we should have taxpayer funded abortions because they don't like my bill that I brought. MCCL wants to kill babies, they think life doesn't begin at conception, they don't want to fight for that, and they also believe in taxpayer funded abortions."  

(Facebook video from Senator Nathan Wesenberg, July 5, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18uDSNAS4Z/)

"Fight to STOP FUNDING ABORTIONS! In 2023, myself and [another senator] stood up for life with great pushback from the Republican Party and MCCL ... MCCL states in their letter that most of the public and Pro-life legislators understand that we MUST vote to fund abortions through Medicaid. This is gaslighting. MCCL is not telling you the truth, but telling you what they want you to hear and lying to make you believe it."

(Facebook post, Nathan Wesenberg for Senate, July 19, 2024)

The truth: MCCL helped draft and pass the 1978 bill that stopped taxpayer funding of abortions in Minnesota. That law stayed in force until 1995 when the Minnesota State Supreme Court, in the case of Doe v. Gomez, forced the state to pay for them. MCCL has never said, as Sen. Wesenberg alleged, that this means legislators must vote for abortion funding. But it does mean that a vote for the state budget does not cause abortion funding — the courts have shown in multiple cases that they will require the state to fund Medicaid and its abortions even if there is no state budget, as has happened when there’s been a state government shutdown because no budget was passed. Each time, abortion funding continued.

In May 2025, MCCL put out this definitive piece that proved to anyone who wanted to know that abortion funding was caused by a ruling of the state Supreme Court, not by a vote of the legislature. Further, in this piece we listed thoroughly a total of five court cases that support our claim that, even when the legislature has not funded ANY money for the Medicaid program, the courts still enforce that the state pay for Medicaid, including its abortion funding required by the state Supreme Court.

From the state Supreme court in Doe v Gomez: “Our decision is only based upon this court's determination that a pregnant woman, who is eligible for medical assistance and is considering an abortion for therapeutic reasons, cannot be coerced into choosing childbirth over abortion by a legislated funding policy."

False claim 3: MCCL supports child rape

“So people need to know there’s organizations like MCCL that are telling people that I am too extreme for Minnesota; the laws that I’m passing are bad. Well apparently, MCCL thinks that it’s okay to sexually mutilate your children and to let adults rape children. I also brought legislation that says life begins at conception. They think that’s bad apparently because I’m too extreme. They think extreme is saying you should not rape children. So MCCL thinks raping children is okay and changing their sex is okay." 

(Facebook video from Nathan Wesenberg for Senate, July 7, 2026, https://www.facebook.com/share/v/19DQsuMj62/)

The truth:  This is despicable, shows the bizarre nature of Sen. Wesenberg’s attacks over the years, and doesn’t deserve a response except to say MCCL spent more than a million dollars in 2024 in ads to defeat a constitutional amendment that would have allowed abortion up to birth and some of the other evils Sen. Wesenberg talks about here. MCCL is the state’s leader in defending the lives and dignity of children and it is despicable to suggest otherwise.