With the memory still fresh from my first CSW (five years ago) I was much encouraged this year with the number of pro-life lobbyists present. Most lobbyists fell into two categories: generous college students on Spring Break or fed up pro-life moms from the Midwest! Both groups “made their presence felt;” there was no question that they were a viable force. There were also a significant number of pro-life, pro-family side-sessions, with speakers including Miriam Grossman and Pam Stencil, as well as researchers, MDs, and ObGyns. In particular, one session about the importance of motherhood was attended by approximately 500 persons.

Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, representatives of the Obama Administration weren’t tuned into the pro-life U.S. citizens present (you know, the American people whom they represent). They were more concerned about advocating for things like the Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) Ratification, among other things.

CEDAW is a women’s rights international agreement of the UN that was first adopted in 1979. Worthy of mention is the fact that this agreement would also advance such policy areas as abortion rights; same-sex marriage; legalization of prostitution; gender re-education; and would negate parental rights. Out of 192 member countries, the U.S. is one of eight not to ratify; ratification would require 67 senators to vote affirmatively.

Despite efforts from previous Democrat Administrations, proponents have not been successful in achieving ratification. But the Obama Administration is actively working to change that. In her remarks to the CSW, Secretary Clinton named CEDAW ratification as a major priority for the Obama Administration. Karen Richardson, Senior Advisor on International Organizations to State Department Ambassador for the Global Women’s Issues Bureau Melanne Verveer, spoke at a number of CSW workshops and affirmed that the Obama Administration and in particular Amb. Verveer are working actively with the Hill to ratify CEDAW.

Interestingly, Secretary Clinton also noted in her remarks to the CSW the recent issue article on Gendercide in The Economist, noting that sex selection abortion has left the world with 100 million fewer girls than it should have. While I appreciated the fact the Secretary noted this tragedy in her remarks, I only wish she would make the necessary connection between the abortion rights she so aggressively advocates and the societal ramifications that follow, such as this appalling gendercide reality. Abortion never has been — and never will be good for women.

That’s good news.  But given the Times’ addictive advocacy of unrestricted access to abortion on demand (federally funded, at that), I could not help but being impressed by the unintended irony of the op-ed’s title.  This year, somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 million unborn children will be aborted in the United States. 1 This does not count the many who will die due to abortafacient contraceptives.

It is estimated that more than 70 percent of the abortion facilities in the United States are located in or near minority population centers. 2 The “black genocide” is real, as the abortion industry targets little ones of color long the targets of eugenicists like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.  Even the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, formerly the research arm of Planned Parenthood, notes, “[T]he abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women.”  3

Worldwide, approximately 42 million unborn children will be killed in utero this year, many of them due to the largesse of the United States (the Obama Administration’s funding of international “family planning” groups that provide abortions to women in the developing world). 4 Although the Times warns against “waking up one day and discovering there are no tuna left to fish,” protecting those little lives far outweighs protecting tuna.  As Jesus said to His disciples, “You are far more valuable than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:31).  He might have added, “and than many fish.”

I’m glad the bluefin might be saved.  I like a good tuna salad sandwich as much as the next guy.  But I long for the day when as much moral urgency will be given the preservation of the unborn as the New York Times has today given to the continued sustenance of a fish.

1 http://www.guttmacher.org/media/presskits/2005/06/28/abortionoverview.html

2 http://blackgenocide.org/planned.html

3 http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/11/3/gpr110302.html

4 http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/12/4/gpr120402.html

“Angie,” a single mother of a four-year-old son, is documenting her second child’s termination via Twitter and blog. She also appeared on YouTube to discuss her decision and experience. Angie is getting cheered on for her “brave” decision by fellow bloggers posting on her site.

Anyone following this story or watching her on youtube will feel sorry for Angie and want to do whatever they can to help her. Those responding on her blog think the helpful response is to support her “choice” and encourage Angie’s termination of her baby.

I, however, disagree with Angie’s cheerleaders. Supporting her decision to abort her baby unintentionally does a grave injustice to Angie, her unborn child, her son and even her boyfriend.

Abortion kills one person and wounds at least one additional person.

For any woman who might think that abortion could ever be the “best” option, I would encourage visiting this site, which includes testimony from women who underwent abortions.

I would also encourage reading the pamphlet on the psychological effects of abortion, co-authored by a formerly pro-choice psychiatrist who continually counseled women struggling emotionally and psychologically after having an abortion.

The following link shows studies with the physical consequences of abortion.

For boyfriends, husbands and men who are struggling with the decision or aftermath of abortion, see this link.

And for any woman who has chosen abortion and is struggling with her choice, please visit the following link.

To Angie, or anyone who has been in her position — may you find the necessary peace and healing that can only come by accepting that abortion is never the best choice for a mother or baby.

I said a prayer for this woman, but I began to ponder whether this is the first of many videos covering senseless acts of tragedy against an unborn life.  Abortion is the loss of a life with much potential, and the fact that this was broadcast online for the world to see only provides the opportunity for bringing an alternative to abortion into the limelight.

With the help of a Pregnancy Resource Center, this woman could have received assistance and sound medical advice to bring her child into the world.  Even if she did not want the child, there is the option of adoption.  Adoption would allow this child to be loved and cared for by a family, in addition to allowing that child to pursue dreams and opportunities.

FRC recently published a report about the difference Pregnancy Resource Centers are making in the lives of women contemplating abortion.  Take for example, Megan, who was considering using RU-486 (the same drug the woman in the video used) to abort her baby.  However, after a change of heart and receiving support from her local Pregnancy Resource Center, she gave birth to her daughter, Ava.

Megan’s decision saved a beautiful life with much potential.  The tragedy is that the woman in the video will never know her terminated child’s potential.

President Obama’s powerful words at today’s National Prayer Breakfast were rightly examined by my dear colleague, Cathy Ruse. How can the same man who wants to force us to pay for the slaughter of innocents seem so convincing? He is surely right to say we must see the face of God in our fellow human beings. We must. Does he?

Abraham Lincoln said it well in 1858. He said the Founders believed that “nothing stamped in the divine image was sent into the world to be trod upon.” Our question to President Obama, with all due respect, is: Are not unborn children so stamped? Can we not see the face of God in their faces?

Lincoln condemned no one in his Second Inaugural, but he said it must seem strange for anyone to ask the help of a just God in wringing his bread from the sweat of another man’s brow. Then the President quoted Scripture: Let us not judge lest we be judged. So we must not judge.

Mother Teresa was the 1994 honored speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast. I remember when the leaders of FRC came back from that event. They told us the marvelous reaction of the multitude when Mother Teresa pleaded for the lives of unborn children. She described the killing of the unborn as the greatest threat to the peace of the world. The greatest threat.

This winner of the Nobel Peace Prize had worked her entire life among the outcasts of Calcutta, the poorest of the poor. President Reagan had called her “the Saint of the Gutters.” Many a dying Indian had been cared for by Mother Teresa and her loving Sisters of Charity.

On that day, dais was filled, as it is today, with the rich and the powerful. President Clinton, Mrs. Clinton, Vice President Gore, Mrs. Gore were in attendance then. When this frail but fearless little woman strode to the microphone, she had to stand on tiptoe to reach the microphone. But her unforgettable words were greeted by thunderous applause. It came in waves.

The Clintons and the Gores did not applaud. They sat there as if frozen. They appeared to have been turned to stone, like the great statues on Easter Island. None of these rich and powerful people seems to have been affected by the words of the Saint of the Gutters.

But those words were heard on high. They resound with us still. As the Russian proverb has it: One word of truth can move the world.

That great Wave threatened to sweep all before it. The work of decades would be undone. The people had spoken. For many in this democratic republic, the voice of the people is the voice of God. To say no to anything President Obama wanted was to risk being called an obstructionist, a blinkered reactionary, or worse, a racist, a terrorist.

Mr. Obama took the advice of those who specialize in doing things the smart way. If you’re going to do something many of the people might not like, do it fast, do it early, and give them time to forget about it.

It’s the same cynical advice these smart types gave to John Edwards. Wait until an earthquake happens in Haiti, or a revolution occurs in Massachusetts, before you admit paternity, before you stop your relentless lying. And then hope nobody notices. The roar of the Wave might mask whatever you say.

So, President Obama very quickly cast down the Mexico City Doctrine of Ronald Reagan. That policy was duly reaffirmed by both Presidents Bush. Who cares about this stuff, anyway? Wingers? Thumpers? People who are, in the dismissive words of the Washington Post, “poor, uneducated, easy to command?”

The Mexico City Doctrine meant that the United States taxpayers would not have to pay for the slaughter of innocents abroad. It was the overseas equivalent of the Hyde Amendment at home. It had the support of people who, though they might differ on whether abortions should be legal or not, at least could agree that pro-choice and pro-life Americans should not be taxed to pay for this.

In that sense, Reagan’s Mexico City Doctrine is that common ground middling folks say they are always seeking. So where was their outcry when the Wave swept it away? I’m still waiting.

But those who caught the Wave forgot about the Rock. The Rock is often out of sight, often submerged. It is that hard conviction that America is indeed a special land, that Americans are, in Lincoln’s words, “an almost Chosen People,” that our Declaration of Independence spoke an eternal truth when it said our rights are inalienable. These rights, said President Kennedy, come “not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.” This great truth is the Rock.

In the past year, we were told by Newsweek that President Obama hovered over the nations, like “sort of a god.” That was at Normandy. Then, we were told that he had become the Bringer of Peace. That was at Oslo. Finally, he told us he would be the one “who would cause the oceans to cease to rise.”

The ocean has ceased to rise. His Wave ebbed. And then receded. What the Wave left on the shore is a lot of flotsam and jetsam, the wretched refuse of broken dreams and deflated ideology. It’s not just a lowered approval rating. Those measures could not begin to gauge what really happened.

What we’ve seen is a great iconoclasm–the breaking up of an image or images. The images broken in this year represented the idea that we could bring material prosperity through profligate waste, that we could become healthier while massively dealing in death, that we could heal the planet through human effort alone with no regard for the One who made the earth and loved it.

So now, as the low moan of the receding tide is heard, as Mr. Obama’s fellow party members are surging and seething and sounding on each other, the Rock has re-emerged.

Americans have not given up their convictions. When candidate Obama said he wanted to reduce the number of abortions, no one in the press, no one in the debates challenged him. How can you make them fewer by making them free? If abortion is a fundamental right, as your campaign and your party say it is, why should we have fewer of them? If abortion is just a “tonsillectomy,” as leading members of your congressional wing say it is, why shouldn’t it be covered in your health care plan? If you think not paying for abortions is part of a “tradition” in Washington, then what has become of your promise of change? And if federal funds don’t pay for abortion-on-demand, what about your pledges to Planned Parenthood? If you’re really not in favor of forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions, why won’t you accept the Stupak Amendment, which makes that ban explicit?

If it were not for the pro-life movement in this country, ObamaCare would already have been signed. The pro-lifers are not the Rock. Truth is the Rock. The Wave broke on the Rock but the Rock remains.

President Obama, by contrast, famously answered Rev. Rick Warren’s question about when the unborn child begins to have human and civil rights by saying “that question is above my pay grade.” But Mr. Obama’s policies all assume the body on the sidewalk is dead.

There’s yet another thing you will never learn reading the papers about Roe. Just where were those abortion laws of the fifty states that were struck down by the Supreme Court that dread day? They were not in the family law codes. Nor in the child custody codes. Not in the medical licensing statutes.

The abortion laws of the fifty states were typically found in the “Homicide” sections.

No state made abortion a homicide in the first degree (“pre-meditated murder,” to most of

us lay people.) This may have been due to wise 19^th century state lawmakers who did not want to prosecute women. And it may have taken account of the difficulty of obtaining convictions where the evidence of the unborn child’s body was hard to find.

Still, that these laws were homicide laws tells you volumes. Some of our younger pro-life friends believe that the Court could not have known about the humanity of the unborn child in 1973. Not so. Yes, we know so very much more now. Yes, we have 4D ultra-sound that we did not have then.

But they knew in 1973. Everyone knew. I recall sitting in the Catholic hospital where my mother worked in the late 1960s. Across from me in the waiting room was an expectant  Filipino woman. She could hardly speak English, but she wore a tee shirt with an arrow pointing down at her tummy. The tee shirt said: “Baby.” Everyone knew what that meant.

The state lawmakers knew as early as 1857, when science discovered that human life begins at conception. And every accurate scientific and medical textbook since has acknowledged this inescapable but, to politicians like Al Gore, inconvenient truth:
“The chromosomes of the oocyte and sperm are…respectively enclosed within female and male pronuclei. These pronuclei fuse with each other to produce the single, diploid, 2N nucleus of the fertilized zygote. This moment of zygote formation may be taken as the beginning or zero time point of embryonic development.”
[Larsen, William J. Human Embryology. 2nd edition. New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1997, p. 17]

President Obama: I have the honor to present to you the human oocyte and sperm. And they didn’t even have to crash your White House dinner. I was introduced to them in high school biology. Sir, I wanted you to meet them.

Since the public has been deliberately misled about Roe v. Wade, it will be necessary to educate people about it. That’s why, when confronted with insistent media questions on “overturning” Roe v. Wade, I hope the pro-life community will resolutely respond:

Roe overturned all fifty state laws that protected unborn children and their mothers. Roe needs to be corrected.

“Overturn” is what happens to SUVs in a ditch. “Overturn” is radical and dangerous. The American people are inherently conservative and reflexively reject that which is radical and dangerous. Liberal activists and journalists know this. That’s why they always frame every question about abortion—or at least the ones they lob at pro-life candidates—in terms of “overturning” Roe.

They know what they are doing. Shouldn’t we?

First, we must remember that the American people have been misled by the major news media about Roe v. Wade since that dark and dreary day 36 years ago.

The media regularly call Roe a “landmark decision.” Landmark is a good thing. It connotes something historic and of great weight. You never hear the infamous 1857  Dred Scott ruling that upheld slavery in the territories called “landmark.”

Almost never will a story about Roe include the critique of Yale Law School Dean, John Hart Ely. Prof. Ely, although he favored liberalizing our abortion laws, was unimpressed by the legal reasoning behind Justice Harry Blackmun’s Roe v. Wade ruling: “It is not constitutional law and it gives no impression of an obligation to be constitutional law.” According to Bob Woodruff’s behind-the-scenes book on the Supreme Court, the Justices’ clerks were even more dismissive, calling the opinion “Harry’s abortion.”

Harvard Law Professor Archibald Cox was a friend of the Kennedy family. He, too, was not impressed with the land that Roe was marking:

[Blackmun’s opinion] fails even to consider what I would suppose to be the most important compelling interest of the State in prohibiting abortion: the interest in maintaining that respect for the paramount sanctity of human life which has always been at the centre of Western civilization, not merely by guarding life itself, however defined, but by safeguarding the penumbra, whether at the beginning, through some overwhelming disability of mind or body, or at death.

Continuing to blast Roe, Cox wrote:

The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations, whose validity is good enough this week but will be destroyed with new statistics upon the medical risks of child-birth and abortion or new advances in providing for the separate existence of a fetus. . . . Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution.

President Kennedy’s appointee to the Supreme Court, Justice Byron R. “Whizzer” White was one of two votes against Roe on January 22, 1973, and faithfully ever after. Justice White condemned the ruling as an example of “raw judicial power.”

But the media, in their worshipful treatment of Roe, rarely include such comments. Nor do they remind Americans that Roe was so radical it overturned the abortion laws of all fifty states. Even the most liberal state laws on abortion—like those of New York, Washington, California, and Colorado—were overturned by Roe’s yet more radical rule.

Further, the media regularly report that the Supreme Court “legalized abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy.” That’s true, but misleading.

Yes, the Court made abortion legal in the first trimester (three months), but it also so strictly limited the protections a state might afford to unborn children after the first trimester as to effectively give us abortion-on-demand until birth. (And, in some horrific cases, even after birth.)

Describing Roe this way is like describing Hitler’s blitzkrieg in Western Europe like this:

“German forces today overran Belgium and Luxemburg.” Surely they did. But they also simultaneously invaded France!

In practice, Roe legalized abortion in all three trimesters. This makes U.S. abortion law more radical than any other advanced democracy.

So the public has been consistently misinformed about the radical nature of Roe v. Wade.

But it is also misinformed about the reasons given for most abortions. Well over 90% of abortions are done today–and have been done since 1973 for reasons that the American people do not support–reasons of financial hardship or emotional distress.

Liberal Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, who retired earlier this year, famously wrote that the three reasons for abortion are “rape, incest, and me.” She was candidly admitting that pro-abortion groups use the horrors of rape and incest to conceal their true agenda: abortion-on-demand.

The numbers of abortions are typically reported in decimal form—1.2 million. Cynical Communist dictator Joe Stalin said it: “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” He should know. By not reporting the annual deaths from abortion as 1,200,000, or the total since Roe was issued as 49,000,000, the press collaborates in minimizing the impact.

By way of comparison, America’s Civil War claimed the lives of 630,000 young men, World War II cost us 424,000. Is there any other way to assess the gravity of a war? The worst riots? The worst flood? The worst earthquake? They’re judged by the numbers of human lives they take.

(continued in Part II)

• “Mercy Gilbert scores state first with stem-cell treatment,” Parker Leavitt, The Arizona Republic
• “Adult stem cells have yielded successes,” Linda D. Schauer, The Argus Leader
• “Forming New Brain Cells: Key Regulatory Peptide Discovered,” ScienceDaily
• “The New Inquisition: Ideology’s Corruption of Science,” Wesley J. Smith, First Things
• “Christian leaders’ stance on civil disobedience is dangerous,” Editorial, The Los Angeles Times
• “Evangelical Pastor Rick Warren on abortion, sexuality and Obama,” Nia-Malika Henderson, The Politico
• “N.J. Bishops Rally Flocks to Promote, Support Marriage,” Lawrence D. Jones, The Christian Post

• “Most Americans Against Abortion Coverage in Health Care Bill,” Nathan Black, The Christian Post
• “Church, state and gay marriage,” Editorial, The Los Angeles Times
• “Iowa conservatives still focused on gay marriage,” Mike Glover, Associated Press
• “NJ teen barred from abortion protest sues school,” Geoff Mulvihill, Associated Press
• “Sex ed. vs. abstinence,” Charlie Butts, OneNewsNow
• “Pew: Faith-based initiative still popular,” Matthew Hay Brown, The Baltimore Sun
• “Abortion clinic ‘bubble’ law met by protests,” Dan Simmons, Chicago Tribune