Pro-lifers won't shut up and go away

Can't we make those pesky pro-life people shut up and go away? That seems to be the question of the hour in many political and media circles. The answer, loudly delivered in Washington, D.C., last week by tens of thousands of pro-life activists, is a resounding no.

The fact that you probably don't know there were tens of thousands of pro-lifers in Washington on Jan. 22 is one sign that some parts of the media hope to bury the movement against abortion by inattention (if not by misrepresentation). Hundreds of TV, radio, newspaper and magazine reporters are cramming the nation's capital to cover the President's trial, but apparently few of them bothered to look out a window to see the long lines of people of all ages, religions and races carrying signs proclaiming their opposition to abortion on the 26th anniversary of the Supreme Court decisions that legalized abortion-on-demand nationwide (see pages 1 and 5).

This is the 26th year in a row that protesters have traveled to Washington to express themselves on abortion and related issues. No other movement in American history has so consistently mustered the energy and commitment for such an annual trek; certainly, no other movement is made up of people who march for hours in the cold every year, not for themselves but on behalf of those who cannot be there.

When the secular media do turn their attention to abortion, they tend to focus -- invariably glowingly -- on the pro-abortion side. Most recently, in light of the October murder of an abortionist near Buffalo, newspaper articles and TV news segments have exalted abortionists as heroes who risk their lives; it is the bias of many of those same reports that they unfairly collect all pro-lifers under the same insulting adjectives: "dangerous" and "violent." Such tarring of the overwhelmingly peaceful pro-life movement deflects attention from the violence of abortion itself: According to statistics from the New York State Department of Health, in the three months since that single doctor's death, 36,300 unborn children have been killed in New York State. Have you read that statistic anywhere?

Playing off that same doctor's killing, politicians are now laboring to restrict pro-lifers from speaking and demonstrating -- in effect, to force them by law to "shut up and go away." Against America's foundational beliefs in freedom of speech and assembly, both federal and state legislation seeks to quiet the voices of the voiceless. Those voices -- Pope John Paul II's among them -- proclaim what many people don't want to hear: the humanity and right to life of the child in the womb.

Speaking in Mexico within hours of the Washington March for Life, the Pope once again linked many of the life issues, saying: "The time has come to banish once and for all from the continent every attack against life. No more violence, terrorism and drug-trafficking! No more torture or other forms of abuse! There must be an end to the unnecessary recourse to the death penalty! No more exploitation of the weak, racial discrimination or ghettoes of poverty! Never again! These are intolerable evils which cry out to heaven. [No one should] dare to harm the precious and sacred gift of life in the womb."

The latest attack on life in the womb is aimed at the very beginnings of life. The Clinton Administration, which has been the most pro-abortion in history, is seeking to permit federal funding of research using human pluripotent stem cells. That violates the spirit of current federal law, noted Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities. Possibly timed to mark the anniversary of the 1973 Roe decision that legalized abortion nationwide, the National Institutes of Health recently decided that research on embryonic stem cells does not fall under the terms of a law banning federal funds for human embryo research.

"The Clinton administration now seeks to do indirectly what Congress has forbidden it to do directly," Mr. Doerflinger said. "This new policy violates the spirit of current law and should be repudiated by Congress." That law prohibits the use of federal funds for "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero."

Such moves by some politicians, who are often given cover by many in the media, are one reason pro-lifers won't go away and shut up. The anti-life forces that target everyone from the unborn to the elderly, with stops in between for those with disabilities and for the poor, need to be countered constantly. Millions of dedicated and peaceful people have taken on that noble task in one of the most selfless social movements in history.

(01-28-99)

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