WASHINGTON (BP)–Pro-life leaders called for the government to do much more to protect unborn children while celebrating the youthfulness of the movement on the occasion of the 29th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.
Tens of thousands of people marched in Washington to protest the Roe v. Wade ruling, as they have every Jan. 22 after 1973. The March for Life also has come to represent a statement for a pro-life ethic on other issues as well, including human embryo research, cloning and euthanasia.
Pro-life and pro-choice advocates, meanwhile, held competing news conferences on the same day. While abortion-rights leaders issued warnings about a judicial threat to Roe v. Wade, abortion opponents charged the federal government with a lack of action on the issue.
Rep. Chris Smith, R.-N.J., one of the most fervent pro-lifers in Congress, told the crowd gathered for the march, according to a release from his office, “[M]any pro-life politicians act as if abortion is just another issue. Something else always seems more important, more pressing, a higher priority, more urgent. And after all, we all just want to get along in the big tent. The result: Indifference, inaction and legislative paralysis in Congress and in the White House.
“Your government — and I include myself — has been lukewarm,” Smith said. “Our lukewarmness in government has enabled a holocaust of over 40 million children. Your government must be lukewarm no more.”
Family Research Council President Ken Connor said in a written statement, “On Sept. 11, we were horrified as we watched the destruction of more than 3,000 innocent human lives. In an instant, our government responded to protect the country from further loss. But the sad reality of American life is that more than 4,000 children die every day in this country at the hands of abortionists and the government does nothing to intervene.
“While [President Bush] deserves an ‘A’ for rhetoric, this administration gets an ‘Incomplete’ when it comes to real action in promoting a culture of life,” Connor said.
Yet, pro-life leaders also acknowledged the movement is making gains among Americans and is growing in the number of young people involved.
Sen. Sam Brownback, R.-Kan., told the marchers, according to a transcript, “The number of young faces in the crowd gives me great hope for the future of our country. It gives me hope that one day this dark hour will pass and that we will once again treat all of humanity, at whatever stage and in whatever condition, with the dignity they deserve.”
Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told Baptist Press, “The thing I find perhaps most encouraging as I go around the country speaking to pro-life groups is to see the increasing numbers of young people who have joined the pro-life cause. These young people understand that the only reason they were not killed before birth, like one-third of the babies who were conceived at the same time they were, is that their mothers chose not to do so. They feel a personal and emotional pain and sense of loss over our nation’s failure to extend adequate legal protections to the unborn babies they once were in the womb.”
Bush spoke to the marchers by phone, making it the first time a president had done so since his father was in the White House from 1989-93.
“Everyone there believes, as I do, that every life is valuable,” Bush told the crowd by phone from West Virginia, “that our society has a responsibility to defend the vulnerable and weak, the imperfect and even the unwanted, and that our nation should set a great goal that unborn children should be welcomed in life and protected in law.”
His administration opposes partial-birth abortion, government funds for abortion and all forms of human cloning, while supporting parental notification for minors, crisis pregnancy outreaches, adoption and teenage sexual abstinence, Bush said.
Leaders of both the National Abortion Federation and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League warned the president could bring about the reversal of the right to abortion with one nomination.
“In 2002, we stand at the precipice — one vote from the very edge,” NARAL President Kate Michelman said in prepared remarks for a pro-choice coalition news conference. “One vote from the end of Roe, from the end of our constitutionally protected freedom of choice.
“President Bush holds the future of that right in his hands,” she said. “If he appoints just one more Supreme Court justice hostile to the right to choose, Roe could be toppled forever.”
The high court, however, has only three of nine justices who appear to be clear votes to reverse Roe v. Wade, a fact acknowledged, for example, by Newsweek magazine on its website. Only Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have expressed any willingness to overturn Roe.
The ERLC’s Land said the “pro-life movement continues to grow and continues to win the battle for the hearts and minds of rank-and-file Americans” despite not enjoying the support of any of the “culture-shaping” entities in society.
“Last year for the first time, public opinion polls showed that a majority of Americans believe the Roe v. Wade decision was a bad decision,” Land said. “The partial-birth abortion debate, as well as the embryonic stem cell research and cloning issues, have refocused increasing numbers of Americans on the undeniable humanity of the human fetus.
“In addition, the pro-life movement continues to benefit from the eloquent nationally televised speech by President Bush explaining his position on federally funded embryonic stem cell research,” Land said. “President Bush did perhaps more to humanize unborn children in the early stages of embryonic development in that one short speech than any single event in the history of the pro-life movement. As a consequence, millions of Americans have re-evaluated the humanity of these unborn children in a positive way.”
In August, Bush explained in detail his position on embryonic stem cell research, announcing he would permit federal funds only for the 60 or more stem cell lines that already exist, thereby not funding research requiring the future destruction of embryos. While Land and some other pro-lifers expressed disappointment the president would support funding of already existing cell lines, they acknowledged the decision could have been worse.
“The pro-life movement is without parallel in American history, in that it is a purely grassroots movement that has not had the backing of any major culture-shaping group, and in fact has endured the active hostility of the media, entertainment, legal and intellectual elites,” Land said. “The abolitionist, civil rights and labor reform movements all had the backing of one or more of the culture-shaping elites.”
In a new abortion poll, the Gallup Organization reported 39 percent of Americans surveyed earlier in January said abortion laws should be more strict, while 19 percent said they should be less strict and 39 percent said they should remain the same. This was an increase of 5 percent from the year before in those who desired more restrictions.
At a pro-life vigil in Washington on the eve of the March for Life, Anthony Bevilacqua, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Philadelphia, said, according to a news release, “To be Christian should mean we are pro-life. In more direct language, it must be said that no one can consider himself or herself a true Christian who consciously supports abortion or euthanasia. If the weak and marginalized continue to be exploited, by our silence we betray not only our Christianity but our humanity.”
The pro-life vigil is the largest Catholic mass held yearly in the United States.
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(BP) photo posted in the BP Photo Library at http://www.bpnews.net. Photo title: VALUING LIFE.
