I spoke with Clark, who had come in from nearby Baltimore. His home congregation, he told me, was Martini Lutheran Church. Martini? I was surprised. I thought Lutherans were supposed to like something else. You know: Bibel, Bach, und Bier. Well, no, Clark said, Martini Lutheran congregation is 143 years old, founded in what was then a largely German-speaking city. It was named after St. Martin of Tours—for whom Martin Luther himself had been named. It was a strong reminder that the roots of these Lutherans go way back and are, in many senses, joined with their Catholic antecedents.

This little flock braved the cold–17° F. this morning, but rising to the balmy 20s by the time of the March. A Lutheran pastor told me he had come with his congregation from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan—by bus. Tens of thousands of the largely Catholic crowd had been on the road since last night for this annual event on the nation’s Mall.

Rev. Jim Lamb, the Executive Director of the national Lutherans for Life organization, hailed me. It was hard to recognize each other, swathed as we were in hats, gloves, and scarves. Pastor Lamb had come in from Iowa for the March for Life. A number of staffers came from the International Center of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, all the way from St. Louis.

Jim Lamb told me that LFL had achieved an important goal under the new president of the LCMS. President Matt Harrison had extended official recognition of the LFL organization. That meant that this 2,400,000-member church body would be increasing its pro-life presence and witness.

Jim Lamb reminded me of the work of Dr. Jean Garton, the late Rev. Richard Neuhaus, and Rev. Jack Eichhorst in the 1970s. These and other Lutherans (yes, the illustrious Richard Neuhaus was a Lutheran back then) together made a strong statement that Lutherans are for Life. And they gave their biblical reasons for it.

Why was that important? After the initial shock of Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973, the pro-abortion forces tried to dismiss all opposition to abortion-on-demand as “only a few right wingers.” The adamant refusal of the Catholic Bishops of America to be put in that media box is justly famous. Millions of Catholics continued to bear faithful witness to what Pope John Paul the Great would call “The Gospel of Life.” Well, then, the media insinuated, it’s just a Catholic issue.

Lutherans for Life proved it wasn’t just a Catholic issue. At this point in the struggle for life, the thousands of churches represented in the National Association of Evangelicals had not yet had a chance to weigh in for life. That would take several years and the widespread distribution of the video series called Whatever Became of the Human Race with Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop. Soon, the Evangelicals would become a powerful force defending unborn children in America.

So, too, would the 15-million member Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). The fight to reclaim the SBC would extend into the 1980s. But when this great ship’s course was righted, no one gave more eloquent expression to the sanctity of human life than the Southern Baptists.

What that little flock of Lutherans did in the mid-1970s was to help in an important way the efforts of the Roman Catholic community. Catholic pro-lifers could always point to the Lutherans and say: See, we’re not the only ones who understand the need to protect innocent human life.

And the pro-life Lutherans could speak to the mainstream Protestants and say: “We are pro-life on solely biblical grounds. Sola scriptura. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.” It was a most happy and mutually reinforcing alliance.

I was in Washington, D.C., on January 22, 1973. I remember the Washington Post’s reporting on the Roe v. Wade decision. I was miserable about it. But I thought the fight was over. As an unchurched young man, I thought when the U.S. Supreme Court spoke, you had to genuflect and obey.

It was not until I lived in the Midwest that I learned otherwise. Those common sense folk—Catholic, Evangelical, and, yes, Lutheran—lawfully but firmly pushed back. Their effective grassroots efforts taught me that so great a wrong could never be a right.

I didn’t realize on that gray and dreary day of the infamous Roe ruling  that the fight for the lives of unborn children would consume the rest of my life. Two years ago, when we saw the election of a strongly pro-abortion president and Congress, I’ll admit my heart sank. It seemed that all I had worked for the past 25 years had gone up in smoke.

But a month after election day, our daughter and her beloved husband presented us with a grandson. They named him Samuel. It means “God hears.” And from the moment I heard that name, I felt a resurgence of strength. Now, I feel I can fight for another 25 years if I have to. GrandSam deserved that birthday. Doesn’t everyone deserve a birth day?

Before beatification the Catholic Church confirms that a miracle has occurred due to the intercession of the deceased. In Pope John Paul’s case, it is the miraculous cure of a French nun, Sister Marie Simon-Pierre, who had suffered from Parkinson’s disease.  This little nun says John Paul was and is an inspiration because of his defense of the unborn child. “John Paul II did everything he could for life, to defend life,” she said. “He was very close to the smallest and weakest. How many times did we see him approach a handicapped person, a sick person?”

It is hard for me to approach another anniversary of Roe v. Wade without thinking of this great man who once said that “a nation that kills its own children is a nation without hope.”  His very life was a witness to the sanctity of all human life. John Paul survived an assassination attempt and immediately forgave his assassin.  He survived the two greatest threats to life and freedom of the 20^th century, Nazi Germany and Communist Totalitarianism, and of that bloody century, said: “The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn.”

He dedicated an entire encyclical to abortion and euthanasia, and in the magnificent “Gospel of Life” he minced no words:  “No human law can claim to legitimize” abortion, he said.  We have a “grave and clear obligation to oppose” such laws, even through “conscientious objection.”

Another spiritual leader on her way to saintly recognition, Mother Teresa, was his comrade-in-arms on this issue and equally blunt:  “America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation.  The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men.  It has portrayed the greatest of gifts — a child — as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience.”

Imagine the homecoming for these two giants for life: a choir of little ones, in the millions.

Job-hunting for an anti-abortion Democrat wasn’t easy then. It’s not easy now. Then, in the midst of my search came the thunderous news—the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the abortion laws of all fifty states.

Broke, unemployed, I could not have been more dejected. With the Court’s radical ruling, I thought it would be this way forever. In my experience, no one—at least no one who was not a segregationist—had spoken out against a ruling of the Supreme Court. We had been schooled to believe that the Supreme Court had the final word.

The New York Daily News did not run a banner headline on Roe v. Wade to mark that day. Instead, all eyes were focused on the news that read:

Lyndon Johnson Dead at 64 Heart Attack Fells Him in Texas

Tuesday, January 23, 1973

Lyndon Baines Johnson served as our nation’s 36th president.

San Antonio, Tex., Jan. 22 (Special) – Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th President of the United States who set the nation on a course of “Great Society” reforms but left office with his countrymen bitterly divided over the Vietnam War, died today after suffering an apparent heart attack at his central Texas ranch. He was 64.

Almost the only Latin I knew in those days was a quote from French President de Gaulle: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. Thus passeth the glory of the world. That phrase expressed my feelings on learning that LBJ was dead.

You cannot exaggerate Lyndon Johnson’s presence in those days. He was as adulated as Barack Obama in 1964 and 1965, but more despised than George W. Bush by 1968. He was almost a force of nature. In the early days of his administration, he had only to propose a measure and Congress obediently bowed before him. Some of those measures—like the Great Civil Rights Act of 1964, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965—corrected great historic wrongs. But many of his other bills caused grievous problems, harmed millions of families, and haunt us to this day. Love him or hate him, Johnson in his prime bestrode the narrow world like a colossus. And here he had died.

Richard Nixon had just been inaugurated for a second term two days before, on 20 January 1973. Nixon ordered  people to consult Lincoln’s Second Inaugural for guidance on his own oath-taking ceremonies. When all the President’s men studied the profound, troubling words of Lincoln in 1865, and read the Emancipator’s sense of God’s holding our nation in His judgment, they decided to go another direction entirely.

Nixon carried 49 states the previous November. But in crushing Sen. George McGovern, Nixon’s singularly joyless victory was robbed of all sense of triumph. We now know that the mood of dejection came from the top. On Election Night, President Nixon had demanded the resignations of his Cabinet. How weird.

Today, we can give Nixon his due. He promised to end the war in Vietnam with honor. When he took office in 1969, there were 535,000 young Americans fighting in South Vietnam, with hundreds of dead and wounded every week. There was no prospect for peace. Four years later, Nixon had reduced the U.S. forces in country to 25,000. He had forced the North Vietnamese Communists to sign Peace Accords. He had provided arms, funding, and training for the South Vietnamese, who were at least maintaining a fragile independence. And Nixon had brought home several hundred POWs, including young Navy flier John McCain.

We did not know that Inauguration week in 1973 why everything seemed so somber here in Washington. Nixon knew why. The troubles that began with a “third rate burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel the previous June would blow up like a prairie twister to consume the Nixon Presidency.

Distractions of 1973. Johnson dead. Nixon brooding. The wounds of war still unhealed. And then there was this abortion question. I could hardly believe that my beloved country would actually embrace—or at least be forced to submit—to abortion forever.

What had become of the nation that believed “the God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time?” How could Americans ever reconcile themselves to this cruel and unjust ruling?

Well, we didn’t. First in Catholic parishes, then in Lutheran churches, and soon in a mighty rush in thousands of Evangelical churches and para-church ministries, the heart of America rallied.

Within one year, the first March for Life was organized. Efforts soon got underway to resist. Churches and churchgoers sponsored pregnancy resource centers to help desperate young women choose life. Right to life groups organized, lobbied, wrote, and took to the airwaves.

When I joined the March for Life participants today, I rejoiced to stand with people young enough to be my grandchildren. I have gone from a young man to an old man at these marches.

One year ago, all our great expectations seemed eclipsed. It was as if we were thrown back to that dread day of 22 January 1973. How could anyone resist the irresistible tide? The victor brought millions to his historic Inaugural. He was hailed as “sort of a God” by Newsweek Magazine. Once again, Death rode on his pale horse.

What hope and what change we have seen in just one year. Has “Health Care” that kills been stopped? It seems so. Can anyone remember any words to cherish from that Inauguration of just one year ago? We may not be out of the woods, but we are out of the swamp.

This morning, I was late for the March. I got distracted. Not by Johnson, not by Nixon, not by Obama, but my 13-month old grandson on the Internet. Samuel was speaking words that thrilled my heart. His words were conveyed to me by technologies that did not even exist when the High Court did its low work in 1973. These new technologies also provide a window on the womb. They let us communicate the truth. His Truth. This is the Lord’s doing. It is marvelous in our eyes.

High schooler Jake Taylor has it all—basketball stardom, perfect girlfriend, college scholarship, but an old friend’s suicide forces him to discover what he truly values and believes. The film also deals with abortion in a dramatic and touching way, a fitting reminder of what we are fighting for on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

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)