It looks like we pro-lifers lost. We worked hard to win the White House and a pro-life Supreme Court, but came up short. Big time.
Now that he’s been sworn in, twice, Barack Obama will begin to make good on his promises to Planned Parenthood. An executive order is on its way to send taxpayer money to groups that do abortions overseas. Our new president is also eager to sign legislation to fund research in which human embryos are destroyed for their stem cells. And he has pledged to sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), a pro-abortion poison pill which will wipe out some 550 state and federal restrictions on abortion. (This Sunday, Jan. 25, “The Coral Ridge Hour” presents a documentary look at FOCA, “Freedom to Kill: Unlimited Abortion at Your Expense.”)
We can also rest assured that Obama’s picks to replace retiring Supreme Court justices and other slots in the federal judiciary will share his view that women with unplanned pregnancies should not, as he put it, be “punished with a baby.”
When it comes to abortion, our new president is just as hard-line as Planned Parenthood, which kills more unborn children every year than any other organization. Obama told his friends at Planned Parenthood in 2007, “On this issue [abortion], I will not yield, and Planned Parenthood will not yield.”
So we know where he stands and what the near future holds when it comes to law and judges.
So we lost, right? Well, yes and no.
First, we’re not going away. Anyone who thinks the pro-life community will fold and head home is not just puffing, but deeply inhaling. The movement stood up to Bill and Hillary Clinton, helping to block their attempt to socialize health care and mandate tax-funded abortions. We will do the same now if President Obama, with help from Tom Daschle, his pick to be secretary of health and human services, tries to add abortion to the list of required services in a new government standard of care.
Second, we’re a nationwide grass-roots movement. The pro-life cause is not just a lobby in Washington, but is active in communities across America. There are 735 abortion clinics in the U.S., a number on the decline, but the National Right to Life Committee has some 3,000 affiliates nationwide, raising awareness and working to end abortion.
Also, there are more than 3,000 pregnancy care centers across America, offering not just compassionate counseling, but help with practical needs like clothing and medical services, including ultrasound examinations.
Jim McGarvey, who has worked with Hope Pregnancy Center in Broward County, Fla., told “The Coral Ridge Hour” that 80-90 percent of abortion-minded pregnant women decide to give birth when they see their unborn child dancing on the ultrasound monitor.
And this may surprise some. America tilts strongly pro-life. A Marist poll last fall found that just 8 percent of Americans agree with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling that mandated unrestricted access to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. Sixty percent of Americans think abortion should only occur in special cases like rape or incest, or not at all.
Even so, 1.2 million unborn children are snuffed out each year in abortion clinics nationwide. Changing that means changing not just laws, but hearts and minds. We need to make abortion not just illegal, but also unthinkable. President George W. Bush got it right when he said our nation should be a place where every child is both welcomed in life and protected in law. The pro-life movement is at work not just in Washington, but in towns and cities from coast to coast to make that happen.
We’re comforted in this fight by the knowledge that we’ve won before. It was the early church that brought an end to the widespread practice of infanticide in the Roman Empire. And in 19th-century America, the Christian community, joined by crusading newspapers like the New York Times, as well as the American Medical Association and pro-life feminists, worked to criminalize abortion – something feminist Susan B. Anthony called the “horrible crime of child murder.”
Abortion is the defining moral issue of our time. That’s why we won’t quit until both law and culture recognize and cherish the dignity and infinite worth of the least of these – children not yet born.
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Wayne Allyn Root