Dear Friends of Life,
In the next few days South Dakota pro-life leaders will be making a major decision. Either they will choose to forge ahead with a plan to outlaw virtually all abortions, or they will choose to continue the waiting game, allowing more time for changes on the U.S. Supreme Court.
My friends, the babies who are dying today can’t wait for a theoretically flawless court. They can’t wait for “the perfect timing.” The little ones who are dying today can’t wait another moment. Babies are needlessly dying as I write this because our inability to aggressively act at the state level.
It is the duty of pro-lifers to do everything within our power to secure the right to life for every pre-born child, and sometimes that means taking calculated legal risks.
We have posted two opposing legal position papers for your convenience. One is from attorney Sam Casey, who advocates immediate action to ban abortion, (the position I support), and one from attorney Jim Bopp, who advocates a position that would essentially maintain the status quo. Mr. Bopp’s position is supported by the National Right To Life Committee. I heartily encourage you to review them.
Read Mr. Casey’s Paper Read Mr. Bopp’s Paper
Because so much is at stake, we need to “swing for the fence” every chance we get. Only God knows what the future holds or who will be sitting on the bench when this case is decided. That is why Operation Rescue will endorse and materially support the position put forward by attorneys Samuel Casey and Harold Cassidy.
Mr. Casey said it best, “The people of South Dakota are best positioned to advance the national dialogue for the sake of the lives of our children and the health of our mother by enacting the proposed Abortion Bill that has been well crafted and concurred in as to its form and enforceability.” (Emphasis added.)
We, as a movement, must not squander our “best position,” but should take full advantage of it for the sake of the innocent for whom we are the only voice.
Onward toward victory,
Troy Newman
President, Operation Rescue
If the courts were really serious about “protecting” the rights of women, they would require planned parenthood and any other abortion organization to offer pregnancy support services on equal footing with abortion services as part of their informed consent requirements (of course, this would put them out of business).
The deliberate skirting of the informed consent rules by planned parenthood and others is done purposely to deceive women thus, HURTING women. Woman have the RIGHT to KNOW what abortion is and about pro-life services are available to them to support them in their pregnancy. Coerced consent also hurts women when others withdraw support and force the woman physically, mentally and financially into having an abortion.
I believe Sam Casey’s argument is on the right track at the right time. Lives depend on our actions today.
As we speak, Planned Parenthood has $Funded$ a massive door to door campaign of hawkers in South Dakota. When the law was finally passed to stop infanticide altogether in this state, this stealthy group of slicksters coined the name “healthy family” and hired groups and troops of presidential-pizza eating-outsider-experienced-political canvassers to re-propagate and re-member abortion ignorance.
With this new P.P. petition party this time, in order to rescort abortion back to a halt, it will require that some pro-life group once again makes a clear decision to do the unexpected or something outrageous to break Plan P’s industrious pattern of manipulating the ignorant and disadvantaged.
Pro-lifers will have to continue to alienate themselves from conventional tactics and become more ideal and original in their approach. If we expect the unexpected, then we must be innovative and creative enough to deliver the unexpected.
It’s always been the idealists and the outrageous that ply the Yankee trade and spirit.
In order to break a relentless thinking pattern, such as an emotional hate cycle, like slavery or infanticide, psychologists tell us you clearly have to do something outrageous to get people to take a closer look and realize where their thinking has taken them.
In the movie: “Amazing Grace”, Wiberforce, during his twenty-year battle to end slavery, continually invents unexpected, outrageous, means to expose the dreadful suffering of slaves which is always out of sight and out of mind to most of the general public.
In one memorable scene, Wilberforce cleverly traps a sailing excursion where a number of wealthy English and Members of Parliament have just finished a cruise around a harbor entertained by a string ensemble.
The magic of Wilberforce and his men causes the excursion boat to be stopped in the bay next to the slave ship Madagascar, which had recently delivered 200 slaves to the West Indies, although 400 others who were captured died in transit, confined in chains in a space the size of a telephone booth—with no toilets.
Standing on the Madagascar, as the well-to-do men and women cover their faces with handkerchiefs to avoid inhaling the stench of death, excrement and sickness, Wilberforce admonishes his audience offended by the foul stench to remove the handkerchiefs from their noses, saying: “That smell is the smell of death — slow, painful death. Breathe it in; breathe it deeply. … Remember that smell. Remember the Madagascar. Remember that God made men equal.”
Weren’t the testimonies of the many women who suffered from abortion, the reason why South Dakota lawmakers passed the ban on all abortions in the first place? That must have been pretty outrageous for those wealthy legislators to sit up and take action like they did.
Repetition imbues our memory but also detracts from the meaning over time, perhaps this is why so many wallow deeply in this infanticide habit. Comedy is tragedy revisited. Whoopi says she’s had 4 abortions. She can tell you about coat hangers too, yet her daughter became pregnant at 14 and bucked the trend. Babies are emissaries from God and if we allow them to live happy and long enough, we will know unconditionally why the death and Crucifixion of Christ had to be so outrageous.
What I flunk to understand is how one hundred thousand, two hundred and fifty three, mostly-young pro-lifers, will march every year to freezing casual Washington to wage war on abortion, when it’s been proven over and over again that wars are won on the battlefield. Real people live in South Dakota.
“The young do not know enough to be prudent and therefore attempt the impossible and achieve it generation after generation” ~Pearl S Buck-”The Good Earth.”
Wilberforce: “No one of our age has ever taken power.”
Pitt: “Which is why we’re too young to realize certain things are impossible. Which is why we will do them anyway.”
We must admit that the Unruhs leading pro-life South Dakota began with an outrageous, unrelenting approach that has had a powerful impact. Now where is the rest of America “Under God” to receive and pass this baton?
The biggest tragedy of “pro-life” is the fact that we have waisted 34 years on bad tactics. It does not take a court discission to over turn roe. Duncan Hunter has introduced the Life At Conception act severals times to the congress. This would end abortion on demand in all 50 states with passage and a presidents signature. Very few “pro-life leaders” have indorse this. Troy Newman is one of the few that have. We don’t need to regulate abortion on demand, we need to out law it. “pro-life” is it’s own worse enemy.
Maybe be need a film documentary televised on a major network showing the true face of abortion similar to the films made of the genocides in Rwanda. Maybe the millions spent in the courtroom defending pro-life issues only to be given to the pro-abortion lawyers might be more effective if used to show exactly what abortion is. We have shows on T.V. of moms delivering babies why not on abortion.
If abortion has nothing to hide and that it provides such a great public service to women, there should be no reason why it can’t be shown on T.V. The graphic nature of abortion is not an excuse to not showing it as violence is already commonplace in the media.
Also, please note the latest medical reports showing the link between abortion and breast cancer. Every woman and girl should be informed of how abortion increases their risk of developing breast cancer. The evidence of this link is becoming stronger each day. This link needs to be communicated in all forms of media and in schools and colleges.