Never let abortion go unchallenged in our communities.
Editor’s note. This is excerpted from the lead article in the Summer edition of Right to Life of Michigan News.
Michigan and other states are beginning to open back up for business as usual. We all hope the number of coronavirus cases doesn’t increase much, or even declines. Everyday features of life, like haircuts and restaurants that were forbidden, are things we can once again indulge in. Returning to normalcy feels good, doesn’t it?
For the issue of abortion, normalcy should not make us feel good. It should make us recoil in horror every day—if it were possible for a human being to live that way. This most abnormal act of taking the lives of our own children is sadly one of the few things unaffected by the pandemic. Every catastrophe you read about in the news daily—be it a disease, violence, or a person erased—is mirrored every day in our own neighborhoods. Abortion remains the number one cause of death in America— if it was counted. Abortion kills more than cancer or heart disease, and certainly way more than COVID-19 ever could. In the Black community, abortion has taken more lives than every other cause of death combined since 1973.
We don’t read about abortions in the news, unless it’s a conflict over laws or someone’s opinion about the issue. There is no live report from outside an abortion facility where 10 people died today. Because this is all planned and typical, our society pretends those lives never existed or never mattered. While abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood have been impacted by the pandemic, they are still quietly operating. Anecdotal reports from prolife sidewalk counselors and even abortion industry figures suggest abortions may have increased during the pandemic. Perhaps too many women are reaching the conclusion that a world aflame in negative headlines is no place to raise a child.
Now the prolife movement must return to normalcy after being shuttered by the pandemic, which means never letting abortion go unchallenged in our communities.
And yet, there is nothing normal about this “return to normalcy.” We’re still dealing with our petition drive to end dismemberment abortions, the most common late-term abortion procedure. Even though we submitted 379,419 signatures in December of 2019, we’re still going through a long process of the Michigan Bureau of Elections checking the validity of the signatures, with several strange and unprecedented stops along the way.
By now, the signatures should have been verified, our prolife majorities in the Legislature should have voted on it, and our dismemberment ban should be on the books in Michigan—without Governor Whitmer’s signature. Planned Parenthood would likely be in court right now, trying to block the ban—in normal times. …
It is not normal that our government of laws, not men, is utterly dependent on the personal whims of a few individuals in robes. What will ultimately happen with our dismemberment ban? … At this point, who can guess?
The 2020 election is going to be about a great many of those critical issues. Where do we begin to restore normalcy? We suggest following Mother Teresa’s advice and starting with life: “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. That is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”
In this issue, you’ll learn which candidates appearing on the August primary election ballot are prolife and are necessary to helping restore sanity to our legal system. Ultimately, though, simply voting for them is not sufficient to restore sanity. We can’t just rely on elected officials. It all starts with life and our everyday actions to either hold our culture accountable to the idea that every human life has inherent value, or to continue to blithely accept the “new normal” of death and disorder on a massive scale.
Never let abortion go unchallenged.
