By Carol Tobias, President
Editor’s note. This appears on page three of the August issue of National Right to Life News, the pro-life newspaper of record. Please share all of the 43 page edition with your pro-life family and friends.
Our office is a flurry of activity this week (even more so than usual) as 13 young adults are here for a one-week, extremely intense “academy,” learning even more about pro-life issues than they already know but also learning how to convert that knowledge into action.
These students are bright, engaging, and motivated, the ingredients that reassure me that the pro-life movement is in good hands and will continue to fight the legal and cultural battle in an effort to save innocent lives.
Even though we might look to them as “future” leaders of the movement, they are leading now—influencing their friends and communities and bringing new allies into the movement.
As I will tell them at the closing ceremony, this is an exciting time in the movement. We are in an unusual place where, in many states, anything can happen. Some states will say their law is decided, and it is—until the next election, or the one after that.
This makes me think back to the inspirational stories I heard about the early days in the pro-life movement.
After the Supreme Court issued its horrendous Roe v Wade decision, pro-lifers around the country, increased their organizing efforts, motivated by the firm belief that once the country understood the impact of that decision, the ruling would be overturned.
It requires an enormous amount of work to get the Supreme Court to reverse itself. It requires a president to nominate justices who respect the history and text of the constitution and senators to confirm them or the Congress to pass a constitutional amendment that is approved by 3/4 of the states.
The first major step in Congress came from Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) who fought successfully to prevent tax dollars from being used to pay for abortion in the Medicaid program. Many Hyde-type amendments were enacted over the years to expand the limit on tax funding of abortion in various programs.
Meanwhile NRLC affiliates started to pass legislation that required parents be informed before an abortion could be performed on a minor daughter. Many states passed laws to require the abortionist to provide accurate information about possible complications of, and alternatives to, abortion to a woman seeking an abortion.
Early congressional battles centered around attempts to amend the US Constitution. Some wanted the constitution to declare unborn children to be legal persons. Others knew that proposal did not have enough support to succeed and pushed a measure to allow the states to again protect preborn babies as they had prior to 1973.
In 1983, the US Senate finally voted on an amendment to the constitution with a sentence that simply said, “A right to abortion is not secured by this Constitution.”
Two-thirds of the senators present and voting were needed to pass it. If successful, the amendment would have been sent to the US House for a similar 2/3 required vote. If passed in the House, it would be sent to the state legislatures with 3/4 of them needing to adopt the language.
The Senate vote in 1983 to say a right to abortion is not secured by the US Constitution received 49 votes while 50 voted against, with one abstention.
But National Right to Life and its 50 state affiliates didn’t get discouraged and didn’t give up. New strategies were planned. Pro-lifers were determined to push state legislatures to protect the babies as much as possible under Roe and to use those legislative endeavors, along with education, to make sure the public understood the humanity of the unborn child.
NRLC then pioneered legislation to prevent partial-birth abortions and to require care for a baby who survived an abortion, along with many other initiatives.
In order to accomplish all this, our state affiliates honed their political skills and elected legislators who would pass this protective legislation.
At the same time, these affiliates and chapters continued to organize and educate their communities. They set up booths at state and county fairs and identified more and more people who were more in agreement with us than leaning the other direction.
It was a long, steady push forward, until June 24, 2022– we finally saw the day Roe was overturned.
While some states have wonderful laws that protect unborn babies and programs that to support new moms, other states have no laws, no protections, no help for a pregnant woman other than offering to pay to kill her child. Many states are in the middle, teetering between life and death.
That’s why I tell the young people in our office this week that anything can happen. In many ways, these days are like the days after Roe was handed down.
It’s a frustrating time. We want to protect all the babies and help their moms NOW! We want the battle for life to end—we want babies to be the victors.
But like the early pioneers of the pro-life movement, those active in the late 1960’s and the 1970’s, we need wisdom and patience. There are no easy victories with a country as divided as ours. But that doesn’t matter.
We are in this battle because we have been called. Our conscience tells us there is a wrong that needs to be righted and lives to be saved. We will continue to proclaim that every life, from conception to natural death, has a right to live.
We will find ways around obstacles and we will climb mountains placed in our path. Just as the post-Roe movement exhibited patience and persistence, so must the post-Dobbs movement. Giving up or walking away is not an option.