I grew up in a home where we fiercely debated great issues of the day around the dinner table. Excelling in stubbornness and sheer fighting spirit, we were another version of the Fighting Irish. 

Our lively arguments taught us that current events were important and that we sho uld have some passion about them. Yet there were disadvantages in our free-for-alls. Each of us was so eager to win arguments that we didn’t listen caref ully to others’ points of view, or discuss issues in such a way that we all learned more about them. Nor were we adept at persuading (as opposed to bludgeoning) others to our position.

As we matured, we learned that a quiet discussion is often more helpf ul than a rousing argument; yet perhaps we also lost some of the youthf ul passion that energizes societal change.

This common experience has bearing on the question of how to persuade people to defend the lives of unborn children. How can we talk about abortion in a way that wins hearts and minds? Sho uld we moderate our language and the images we use? Can we do that without softening our convictions, losing our edge, and postponing action—while unborn children die by the millions?

I hope to show that we can win over people who are ambivalent and even bitter adversaries—and save many lives—by thoughtf ul choice of words and tactics, by listening more caref ully to our opposition, and by telling better and more hopef ul stories than they tell.

The Iceberg Problem

Whether to defend the unborn is for Americans a crucial personal decision as well as a political one. “Shall I defend my own unborn child? Shall I protect my unborn niece or nephew? My grandchild? How can I do that while also protecting the interests of the child’s mother, whom I deeply love?” This is the way—consciously or subconsciously—that many people first faced abortion. Various pressures and fears, though, may have prompted them to phrase the questions in a more self-interested way: “How can I pay the bills? What will this do to my career? She’s unmarried—What will the neighbors think? How will I explain this to my friends and the folks at church?”

Those who failed to defend the child to whom they were related are unlikely to defend other unborn children now. And those who actually had or encouraged abortions may feel guilty, or believe their decision was the only one they co uld make at the time, or simply not want to think about it at all. We are speaking here of tens of millions of people. Many others, while not directly involved, know someone who has had an abortion. According to a Los Angeles Times poll, 52 percent of the U.S. ad ult pop ulation have had abortions themselves or know someone who has.1

Abortion complicity is the great iceberg just below the surface of the abortion debate. Some abortion foes sense this when they criticize abortion in private conversation and meet silence or evasion. Or they bump right into the iceberg when friends respond with stories about abortions they had or facilitated, which is embarrassing, to say the least, and often leads to decisions to keep quiet about the issue. Those who are publicly active against abortion face the same iceberg: many people are defensive about their decisions and resent pro-life activists, finding it diffic ult to listen to them with an open mind. 

Yet there are ways to reach such people. Canadian pro-life writer Denyse Handler once suggested allowing them to “bury the past”: one might say,  “No doubt, we all did what we thought was right, but with what we know now, we simply can’t go on doing this. We have to move away from abortion and re-examine our thinking towards the unborn child.”2

Not everyone, of course, did what they thought was right; but some did.  Others acted under great psychological or economic pressure, so that their decisions were not entirely free. If they now feel they are under personal attack, they’ll keep defending what they have done. And this is one reason why occasional suggestions of a “Nuremberg Trial” for abortion promoters are misguided. They simply encourage people to harden their positions, to dig in and resist the pro-life case at all costs. Nuremberg proposals also ignore our constitutional ban on any ex post facto law—a law which makes a crime of an act that was not a crime when committed.3

Many people who have been involved in abortion suffer great remorse and guilt. Clergy, mental-health professionals, Project Rachel, and the Centurions can help them.4 But those who have been involved in abortion must be able at some point to move beyond their history. They can’t delete the past, but—as Denyse Handler suggested—they can be helped to bury it.

When I speak in defense of unborn children before a college group, I say early in the talk that some in the audience have probably had abortions or helped others have them; that I’m not trying to make them feel bad or send them on a guilt trip; but that I ask them to reconsider the issue because there are still many lives at stake every day. I believe this gives them the relief of knowing that they are not under personal attack and enables them to listen to my case.

Emphasis on specific alternatives to abortion is a great good in itself, and also a way to acknowledge that many people who have chosen abortion have acted under great pressure, and that no one close to them even suggested an alternative.

The Messenger as Part of the Message

“Don’t say things,” advised Ralph Waldo Emerson. “What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.”5 Excellent advice for those whose private lives conflict with their public positions. 

When pornographer Larry Flynt sought to embarrass members of Congress who were trying to remove President Clinton from office in 1999, he produced an affidavit from an ex-wife of then-Representative Robert Barr, Republican of Georgia, who had been outspoken against abortion. His ex-wife said that, when they were still married and had two other children, he had once driven her to an abortion clinic and paid for her abortion. “Bob never told me not to have the abortion, or that he was in any way against my having the abortion,” she declared. Barr did not deny the specifics of her account, but said he had “never suggested, urged, forced or encouraged anyone to have an abortion”6 . . . a feeble response. If he regretted his complicity, he sho uld have said so.

A respect for humans of all ages ought to be obvious in those who speak  for unborn children. Former Representative Jack Kemp, a New York Republican, and his wife Joanne, who brought up four children of their own, provided a small but telling example of this. In 1996, Kemp, who had a strong pro-life record, was running for vice president on a ticket with former Senator Robert Dole, the Kansas Republican. A San Diego woman attended a Dole-Kemp rally with her husband and their five young children, finding a place in the front row. “When the rally was over,” the woman said, “the crowd began to push its way to the front, and my children began to cry with fear.” Joanne Kemp

passed by, immediately noticed our children and asked what was wrong. She stood by us until her husband came by shaking hands. He, too, immediately noticed our little children down below and yelled to the crowd to stop pushing. He then picked each child up and carried each one to the safe arms of his wife.  She whisked them up to the stage, where they remained safe until the crowd cleared. Mrs. Kemp stayed with my children, and Mr. Kemp returned to make sure all was well. . . . 7

A small story, perhaps; yet it is always heartening to see people so gracef ully practice what they preach.

On the more heroic level, we might think of Dr. Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa, and of the many pro-lifers who have adopted special-needs children. While we can’t all be heroes and saints, we can do our best to help children and others in need.              

 Quaker founder George Fox said, “Let your life speak”8: to Fox’s advice we might add, “Let your love of life speak, too.” When the person who presents the case for life is a warm human being, with a zest for life and a love for humanity, his message is clearly enhanced. Helen Alvare, the attorney who was for years the Catholic bishops’ pro-life spokeswoman, once said that people are attracted to your message “in direct proportion to whether” they are attracted to yourself. “Do they like people like you?” she asked. “. . . . Do they like the world view you’re selling? Do they want to live there?”9

Respect for the person is a bedrock of the right-to-life position. It ought to  lead to courtesy and respect for one’s adversaries as well. This is not selling out or conceding anything on issues; indeed, it makes the pro-life position more attractive by showing it in practice. John Naughton, former chairman of Right to Life of Montgomery County, Md., and a tireless writer of letters to editors, has demonstrated this on many occasions. Responding to a longtime adversary in one letter, Naughton declared: “Even if the Supreme Court sho uld declare Mr. Doerr and all pro-abortionists to be non-persons, that wo uld not lessen their right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness; and right-to-life groups wo uld defend their lives.”10 The late Dr. Joseph R. Stanton of Brighton, Mass., a veteran pro-life leader, once wrote an open letter to c ulinary superstar J ulia Child in response to her support of abortion and Planned Parenthood. After a serious discussion of the issues, he expressed his good will toward her by saying, “May your souffles not collapse and Bon Appetit!”11

The Language of Life

Words can open doors, or slam them shut. They can feel like salve for one’s wounds, or a kick in the stomach. They can appeal to “the better angels of our nature,”12 or make us angry and bitter. There are no magic answers to the question of which words are best in discussing abortion: there is, after all, a built-in tension between being honest about the reality of abortion and holding an audience long enough to win them over. While tact is important, if overemphasized, it can lead to euphemisms (such as “pro-choice”) that obscure reality and deaden conscience.

There is much to be said for choosing neutral words for dialogue and debate, words that do not make everyone pause and fight over semantics for half an hour before resuming discussion. It is better to describe abortion as “homicide,” “killing” or the “taking of human life” than to use the word “murder.” (Technically, by the way, murder means unlawf ul killing; most abortions in the U.S. today are, unfortunately, lawf ul.)

Some people worry that they will make a philosophical concession if they use the term “abortion clinic,” as they believe the word “clinic” means a facility that provides benevolent health care. Yet the word is often used in non-medical contexts—a “reading clinic,” a “golf clinic” or an “auto clinic,” for example. It is better, I think, to use the relatively neutral “abortion clinic” or even the negative “abortion mill” than “abortuary.”

However, the term “pro-choice” sho uld not be used. Doris Gordon, national coordinator of Libertarians for Life, uses “abortion choice” instead, believing that it is “important to name the choice.” (She doesn’t use the term “abortion rights” because, she says, abortion is a wrong—not a right.)13

In what may be the most important word-controversy of all, we sho uld always say “unborn child” instead of “fetus.”  Fetus is a Latin word for “fruit,” “produce” or “offspring.” But as someone once said, for most people the word suggests “a specimen in a laboratory.”14 There is no reason to accept an effort by political thought-police to dehumanize the unborn.

Hit ’Em Over the Head with a 2 x 4?

For years there has been controversy over using color photographs of aborted children in public protests. No one sho uld be surprised that abortion supporters hate pictures showing the ugly and violent reality of abortion, but many opponents of abortion also cringe when they see them. They have long since internalized the pictures; they are haunted by them. Little wonder that they hate to see them again. Pro-life activists may also mistakenly assume that nearly everyone else has seen the pictures. Or, based on their own experience, they may believe that the pictures alienate more people than they convert. And many, having been taught good manners by their parents, may think it rude and unfair to thrust such ugliness on another person without prior warning.

One major objection, though, is that the pictures may traumatize young children, making them even more fearf ul of the real world than they may already be. J ulianne Loesch Wiley, for example, has written and spoken widely against abortion; she has taken part in sit-ins and sidewalk counseling at abortion clinics. She used to go to the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., but she stopped after she married and had her first child, because she feared the child wo uld be traumatized by seeing large photos of aborted children. She wants to be sure that her children have “a lot of experiences with things that are good, true and beautif ul and normal and lovely and holy . . . before they get exposed to anything that’s ugly and perverted.”

Wiley stressed that she does not object to the pictures themselves; in fact, she believes they are quite valuable. But she thinks that “they have to be presented in the correct context, or else they are literally obscene.” She approves the practice of pro-lifers who treat them as pornography—keeping them in brown paper wrappers, showing them only after warning people of their shock potential. “It takes a certain amount of balance and discernment,” she said. “But I think that’s a step in the right direction.”

How about showing them to politicians who vote to keep abortion legal and even to fund it with government money? Sho uld they see what they are funding? Wiley is all for that; she believes “you sho uld make it a mission to go to them frequently and show them personally.”15

Gregg Cunningham, executive director of the California-based Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, makes a strong case for using the pictures in public. He sends huge trucks bearing photos of aborted children (and the word “Choice”) out to cruise freeways during rush-hour, and he has recently hired planes to p ull banners with similar pictures over public beaches and sports stadiums.

Cunningham, like Wiley, is a veteran pro-lifer. A lawyer, he worked against abortion as a state legislator in Pennsylvania and helped end public funding of abortion in Colorado. He has studied the history of social reform in  America and believes that shocking pictures are a key to winning reform.

Cunningham is convinced that Americans, because of their own complicity in abortion, pretend “that first-trimester abortion is the lesser of two evils” and “a necessary evil if it’s evil at all.” The pictures “settle the facts” by demonstrating “the humanity of the unborn child” and also show that “abortion is an evil of such immensity that it sho uld be outlawed.” He says that his group constantly hears from women who had intended to abort their children, but were so shocked by the pictures that they decided against it.

He acknowledged that many people “feel very threatened by this information” because they are “in massive denial,” and believes that “you’ve got to break through all of that denial if you’re going to educate those people. And pictures are by far the most effective way of doing that.” Given the lack of sympathetic news and entertainment media, he said, his group must “force-feed these facts into the heads of people who don’t want the information.” He added that such people “are going to get very angry at us for forcing this information on them” but insisted that “this information has to be thrust on people, which is exactly the way social reform always advances.”

But what about the effects on small children? Cunningham noted that “we won’t take these pictures to elementary schools; we won’t take them to daycare centers, playgrounds, places where obviously every passerby is going to be a young child. But the idea that we can only show these pictures publicly if we can guarantee that no young child will ever see them holds us to an impossible standard.” He commented that young children are “traumatized every time they’re taken to the supermarket and pushed in shopping carts past magazine racks displaying cover photos of airliners’ exploding into skyscrapers or Israelis and Palestinians killing each other.”

Cunningham also suggested that abortion foes who oppose display of the shocking photos in public “really need to sit down and ask themselves, ‘Am I pro-life, or am I pro-feelings?’”16 (This seems unfair to me: the concern is not about mere feelings, but about psychological trauma.)

On the other hand, one co uld argue that small children may be more aware of and more threatened by abortion than many people realize. One psychiatrist said: “I have had children who suffer from night terrors and who fear to fall asleep because they overheard their parents discussing an abortion they had or planned to have. These children fear they may be gotten rid of the next time they make their parents angry.” Two doctors who have studied the effects of abortion on surviving siblings wrote that abortions often are “pseudo-secrets” in families and that children often know or sense that a sibling has been aborted.17

Are there ways of imparting the basic reality of abortion without running into censorship in the media? Line drawings of D & X or “partial-birth” abortions seem to have great impact in the debates over that gruesome practice. Such drawings have been carried in publications that rarely, if ever, show photographs that include the blood and gore.18 A verbal description of D & X abortion by nurse Brenda Pratt Shafer, who witnessed three of them, has also been very effective.19 The same methods can and sho uld be used to describe other types of abortion.20

One of Gregg Cunningham’s programs, the Genocide Awareness Project, does warn people of what lies ahead and gives them a chance to turn away.  Designed especially for university campuses, the project involves large panels with blown-up photos of genocide: the 1890 massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee by U.S. soldiers; lynchings of African Americans; the death camps of Nazi Germany; massacres in Cambodia, Rwanda and former Yugoslavia; and abortion. Cunningham said that “morbid curiosity draws people” to these displays: “the most effective way to draw people to our display site on the university campus is to warn them to not come . . . If you put up signs all around the display, as we do from blocks away, warning people that there are graphic genocide images ahead, that draws people like a magnet.” But he believes that “we can have a much greater effect on many more people” by using the trucks and airplanes.21

It seems to me that those who show the shocking photos in public sho uld also show photos of newborn babies, to remind people that there’s a beautif ul alternative to the death-dealing of abortion. Without that reminder, the photos of aborted children may sink too many of us into depression and despair.

Tactics of Intimidation

J ulianne Wiley commented on another controversial practice. A front-page story in the Wall Street Journal (May, 2002) described abortion foes who photograph women going into abortion mills and then send the photos to be posted on Internet web sites. A recent check of the main site featured in the Journal article showed that the activists are photographing not just women, but also male escorts, male security guards and male abortionists.22 This technique of intimidation may deter some people from having abortions or working for abortion clinics, but it probably also hardens the attitudes of abortion supporters, reinforcing their view of abortion foes as mean-spirited religious fanatics. The Journal article quoted an activist/photographer who screamed at one woman and her escort, “Your sin won’t be hidden or forgotten.”

In Wiley’s view, the photography/Internet combination “just blows apart the sense of safety in the sidewalk environment” so that “you’re never going to be able to do sidewalk counseling there.” Those who have done such counseling “know what a long, sensitive, patient process it takes to get people to allow you to approach them on the street at all. You have to have a very welcoming aspect.” She also thinks that people “are rightly indignant and rightly feel intimidated or even threatened” when they are photographed and their image is posted on a web site without their permission.23

The problem of people who yell or scream when protesting at clinics is an old one. Their total numbers may be relatively small, but they make life diffic ult for the larger group of activists who try to counsel women and to establish a dialogue with clinic staff in order to persuade them to quit their jobs. 

Why do these people scream? Some may do it simply to relieve their own frustration and anger, acting in self-ind ulgence and not really caring about the res ults. Some may do it partly from guilt. The screamer described in the Journal article was a man who many years earlier had paid for the abortion of his own child: perhaps he was, at a deep level, screaming at himself. Other activists cannot control this sort of thing; but they can at least try to persuade the screamers that they are doing more harm than good.  

Listening to the Opposition

One sign of respect for one’s opponents is simply to listen to what they say. Listening can also help to refine and make more effective one’s own statements. Doris Gordon not only listens, but also invites criticism from her opponents within the libertarian movement.“I pick their brains” she once said. She understands that “you need to explain things in different ways very often until people get something. You need to try to say it this way and then try to say it another way, come at it from a different angle.”24

It is important to listen to opponents’ personal stories as well as their arguments. When someone volunteers information about an abortion they had or encouraged, it’s appropriate to ask whether they considered alternatives. This is partic ularly the case with public figures who mention their personal experience. I will deal with several of their stories here, both because there may be a chance of converting them—and any chance of doing that sho uldn’t be missed—and because dealing effectively with their stories can win others over to the pro-life side.

Columnist James J. Kilpatrick once wrote a rather angry article supporting legal abortion. He recalled that many years earlier, as a young reporter covering a medical examiner’s office, he had seen “the body of a beautif ul girl, maybe 16 or 17, lying on the stainless-steel table of the morgue. She had tried abortion by knitting needle, and had died in the agonies of peritonitis.”25 U.S. Representative Corrine Brown, a Florida Democrat, remembered a similar horror. When she was only five years old, she attended the funeral of a cousin who had been pregnant and “co uldn’t face the possibility of being a single mother with another child.” Her cousin had committed suicide by eating potash. “What I remember most vividly about her funeral,” Rep. Brown said, “is that she had swelled up so much her body had to be stuffed in the casket. It was the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen.”26

While we certainly sho uld express sympathy for the women who died and for those who were deeply affected by seeing them, we sho uld also ask whether the women had any positive support from family or friends or doctors. Didn’t anyone suggest ways of helping both mothers and unborn children? If not, isn’t that the place where work is needed?

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen has written countless pieces supporting abortion. Perhaps the most important, though, was one in which he described how he once helped a woman obtain an illegal abortion. Cohen was about 22 at the time, and apparently living in New York City. The woman “was the former girlfriend of a friend who had left town.” She “turned to me and I turned, as you did then, to the underground. For $400 and the carfare to Union City, N.J., the deed was done. It was dirty work. . . . We did what we had to do and went on with our lives.”27 Feminist leader Betty Friedan arranged illegal abortions for a number of friends in New York in the 1940s. “I myself never had an abortion,” she wrote many years later, “though I personally accompanied several of these friends to scary, butchery back rooms, and shared their fear and distrust of the shifty, oily, illegal operators, and sat outside the room and heard the screams and wondered what I’d do if they died, and got them into the taxis afterward.”28

Cohen and Friedan were right in wanting to help their friends; but they sho uld have helped their friends’ unborn children as well. It’s ironic that some people who are fairly sophisticated, and who don’t view themselves as “scarlet letter” enforcers, are nearly as panicked by unwed pregnancy as are the women involved. Instead a friend in this kind of situation sho uld be calm, steady, and encourage nonviolent alternatives.

Some personal stories don’t involve abortion directly, yet have bearing upon it. Former U.S. Representative Patricia Schroeder, a Colorado Democrat, had two diffic ult pregnancies, one of which led to the loss of twins. A third pregnancy ended successf ully in the birth of a daughter, but Schroeder suddenly had a severe hemorrhage and came close to dying. When she recovered after many weeks in the hospital, doctors told her, “We don’t want to see you here again. Another baby co uld kill you.” But when, during an abortion debate, Schroeder told congressional colleagues about these experiences, “hoping to enlighten certain colleagues who seemed to think pregnancy was simple, I was stunned when some responded that if I was ‘malformed,’ I sho uld have had a hysterectomy.”29 Schroeder had such a strong ideological commitment to legal abortion that I doubt greater sensitivity from pro-lifers wo uld have changed her position;  but it might have made her somewhat less vehement.

Kate Michelman, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, was married and had three small daughters when her husband left her for another woman in 1970. “He also walked out of my daughters’ lives,” she said. Shortly after he left, Michelman discovered that she was pregnant again. In desperate financial condition, and feeling that “the very survival of my family was at stake,” she had an abortion.30 She tells her story in public, and I suspect that it has a paralyzing effect on many politicians.

But when I asked some pro-life women how they wo uld have advised Michelman, if they’d the chance, they gave many good answers. J ulianne Wiley was sympathetic, recalling her own times of feeling like “a single-engine, single-pilot airplane being buffeted around in an electrical storm, losing my radio and my radar, you know, and realizing that I was not in a position to make good decisions.” She also said that Michelman’s ex-husband “aborted the family” and “probably has about 95 percent of the moral responsibility for that abortion.”

Wiley and others said they wo uld have helped Michelman obtain support from her family, friends, church and especially from other women. Wiley suggested that Michelman co uld have organized a sort of posse to pursue her ex-husband—“to go after him legally and to go after him socially” so that he wo uld pay child support “and so that his role as the destroyer of the marriage and the abandoner of the children wo uld be acknowledged.”31

Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life of America, said that Michelman’s story “actually inspired me personally to work for” stronger child-support-enforcement as part of welfare reform.32

Helen Alvare wo uld have surrounded Michelman with other women who had been through the same situation and who co uld help her throughout her pregnancy. What Michelman needed most of all, Alvare suggested, was “unconditional emotional support.”33 And Sister Pa ula Vandegaer, executive director of International Life Services, asked whether Michelman had family or friends who wo uld have helped her raise her children, adding “I wo uld have tried to help her draw on the sources of her strength.” Vandegaer said she sho uld have “fought for her rights as a mother and as a woman and had her child and received all of the support that she deserved.”34        

Worried Fathers and Playboy Politicians

The abortion experiences of the late Senator Barry Goldwater, Republican of Arizona, and former Senator George McGovern, Democrat of South Dakota, were not generally known while they were in office: had they been, the senators probably co uld not have run for President. In the mid-1950s, when abortion was illegal except for life-of-the-mother cases, one of Goldwater’s daughters became pregnant while in college. Although she had already planned to marry the child’s father, the young couple didn’t want to have a child at the beginning of their marriage. Goldwater tried to persuade his daughter not to have an abortion; when she persisted, he arranged an illegal one for her. The experience undoubtedly had major impact on his later, extremely ambivalent, and ultimately pro-abortion political stance.35

Former Senator McGovern, long after he left the Senate, wrote a moving account of his daughter Teresa (Terry) and her long struggle with alcoholism. It ended in the 1990s, on a December night in Madison, Wisconsin, when she “left a Madison bar that night, stumbled into the snow, and froze to death.” McGovern revealed that in the 1960s, when Terry was only 15, she became pregnant by an emotionally-unstable boyfriend. Earlier, the boy had severely wounded himself in a suicide attempt, after she had “refused his advances.” The McGoverns’ family doctor, with her parents’ acquiescence and despite Terry’s ambivalence, arranged an abortion for her. McGovern said that his daughter had feared her pregnancy “and yet did not want to terminate” and that an “important part of Terry was devastated by the abortion.” It wo uld be wrong to attribute her alcoholism to abortion alone—she had started drinking when she was 13—but the abortion certainly didn’t help. Yet Senator McGovern supported legal abortion when it became a political issue in the 1970s.36

There is also the category of playboy politicians whose extramarital affairs sometimes res ult in abortion.37 They have special reason to promote legal abortion as a benefit for women rather than for themselves. Might some, though, have guilty consciences?

Telling Better Stories

In lobbying politicians, pro-life constituents can be more effective if they remember that the politicians may have confronted abortion in their own lives. Here, again, an emphasis on non-violent alternatives can be helpf ul.  Instead of simply arguing, the constituents might tell their own stories about hard-case pregnancies that turned out well for all concerned: a teenage mother who is coping skillf ully and completing her education; a Down Syndrome child who is much loved by all and is making progress in school or work; the help a crisis pregnancy center gave someone like the young Kate Michelman or the young Terry McGovern.

Some of the best stories are by no means the exclusive property of pro-lifers. Stories about people who have disabilities or diffic ult childhoods, and nonetheless have good and f ulfilling lives, are a great antidote to the gloomy belief that diffic ulties in childhood predestine one to unhappiness and failure later on. A. J. Cronin, the late Scottish novelist, once said “I had a miserable boyhood. I was an unwanted child and we were very poor.” Yet he was able to become a doctor and to practice medicine in a mining town, which led to Cronin novels such as The Stars Look Down and The Citadel, protesting the miserable working and health conditions of the miners, and to his successf ul writing career. His other novels included The Keys of the Kingdom, The Green Years and Shannon’s Way.38

Elizabeth Lipscomb, unlike Dr. Cronin, never became well-known or prosperous. But those who wonder about the fate of abandoned babies sho uld  ponder her story. Born in 1922 to an unmarried teenager in rural Virginia, she was left on the doorstep of poor tenant farmers who had no other children. After a lonely childhood, she married another tenant farmer and brought up four children of her own. She never had an easy life. But a reporter who visited Lipscomb after her retirement found that she enjoyed reading, watching television, visiting with her children and grandchildren, and going to church. She liked looking out her window at the changing colors of autumn to see, she said, “what God has done with an almighty paintbrush.” Lipscomb remarked that “I’m glad I lived, and I’ve loved life.”39

Dr. Benjamin Carson, an outstanding pediatric neurosurgeon, was a child of poverty and divorce. His mother suffered from depression, but she was determined that her two sons wo uld succeed in school and in life. She insisted that they do their reg ular homework and also made them read library books each week and write reports on them for her. “And she co uldn’t read!” Dr. Carson recalled years later. “But I didn’t know that!” He became a fine student, later a great surgeon. He and his wife started the Carson Scholars Fund, which provides encouragement and scholarships to outstanding students.40

Karin Muraszko was born with a relatively mild case of spina bifida, but one that required surgery and a leg brace. Like Carson, she grew up to become a neurosurgeon. She once told the New York Times, “Because of my handicap, patients open up to me. I can understand their pain and encourage them to get beyond it . . .” One of her former patients told the Times, “I never noticed she was handicapped. All I know is that she was the best doctor and the kindest person I ever met.”41

There are also stories from the front lines of the abortion war, where women and children are often saved from abortion at the last minute by sidewalk counselors. A Shield of Roses group in California supplies much material aid as well as counseling. In one of its cases, a woman ran into an abortion  clinic while her husband or boyfriend stopped to talk with a counselor about the couple’s problems. They had two other small children, and the pregnancy was unexpected. “Besides,” said the father, “where am I going to put another car seat? My car, which is falling apart, can only hold two car seats on the rear seat.” “You’re going to abort because you don’t have room for another car seat?” the counselor asked. “If this is what you need, we’ll get you another car.” The father found a bargain car, and Shield of Roses bought it for the family. The couple named their baby Christopher.42

One Minnesota woman is especially gratef ul for Pro-Life Action Ministries counseling she received many years ago. It persuaded her not to abort her child, now a teenager. Each J uly she visits the group’s office to deliver a rose and a thank-you card in celebration of her child’s birthday.43

Maryland’s Gabriel Project once heard from a young pregnant woman who had been thrown out of her home by her parents, and was calling from a pay phone. The project quickly found a “shepherding family” to take her in and a church to help her in other ways before and after her child’s birth. The woman later said that she had “found hope when I thought all hope was lost.” 

Often a woman’s parents change their views after others step in to help. A Gabriel Project staff member said that “we’ve seen a lot of reconciliation take place between kids and their parents,” when the grandchild who had been rejected “becomes that little bouncing baby on the grandparent’s lap” and “a real source of healing for a lot of people.”44

Stressing the Positive in Their Principles                                     

While it is always tempting to attack the weaknesses of one’s opponents, it’s often better to stress their positive principles and show how these sho uld  lead to protection of unborn children. Defense of the little guy against the powerf ul, the historic position of the political left, sho uld always lead to defense of the unborn—who is smaller, less powerf ul, poorer or more v ulnerable than the unborn child?

Feminists celebrate the strength and ingenuity of women, their ability to overcome all sorts of obstacles in life. Women really can handle crisis pregnancies; they can deal with children and careers at the same time. (To the extent that society still makes this diffic ult, it is society that needs to be changed, not women.) The sisterhood that feminists celebrate sho uld always extend to their unborn sisters, too. It certainly did in the minds of early American feminists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And it does today in the work and writing of feminists such as Sidney Callahan, Mary Krane Derr, Serrin Foster and Rachel MacNair.45

Peace activists know they must offer alternatives to the violence of war, such as conflict resolution, better diplomacy, nonviolent resistance and civilian-based defense. This ought to make them receptive to nonviolent alternatives to abortion, and draw them to help the work of crisis pregnancy centers, for example.

The writer George Weigel has emphasized the point that legalized abortion goes against our American history, which is one of expanding “the community of the commonly protected” to include religious dissenters, African Americans, women, poor people, and people with disabilities. He adds that the “defenders of the rights of the unborn are the true inheritors of the American liberal tradition in its quest to draw more widely the boundaries of the American commons.”46

Socrates Had a Splendid Idea

One historian of philosophy wrote that Socrates was a “perpetual student because there was always something more for him to learn, at least one more question to ask.”47 His “Socratic method” of questioning also helped others to learn. But in the commotion of intellectual battle, we sometimes forget that a question may be more effective than a declaration or a long speech. Placing one or two good questions in someone’s mind may do more good than an hour’s debate. 

A thought-provoking question for a politician might be: “But why are you personally opposed to it? What is it about abortion that bothers you?” For someone who discusses the issue in a totally abstract way: “Have you actually seen the res ults of abortion? If not, wo uld you be willing to look at a couple of pictures?” For a lawyer: “Given both abortion and euthanasia, I wonder if we’re headed for a time when the only people with legal protection of their right to life will be the powerf ul—those who need it least?” For a psychologist or teacher: “Have you considered the effects of abortion on small children? Don’t you think that knowledge of it might terrify them?” For a liberal: “Hey, whatever happened to standing up for the little guy? And why not consider a nonviolent approach to this issue?”

The 21-Gun Salute

Dialogue alone will not win the day for unborn children. Constant political pressure is needed. So is economic pressure in the form of boycotting businesses that support abortion and medical “charities” that support embryonic and fetal research. Also needed are marches and rallies—and a constant presence at the places where unborn children die.

However, dialogue must remain a key part of all these efforts. To the extent that it is calm and steadfast, kind but truthf ul, it will win hearts and minds and  save lives.

When a friend indicates a change of heart in favor of the unborn, or when a politician starts voting right, the occasion sho uld be noted and celebrated. Here pro-lifers can learn from the practice of the late Lyndon B. Johnson, when he was the Democratic majority leader of the U.S. Senate and Dwight Eisenhower was the very pop ular Republican president. Johnson explained that the Democrats prodded Eisenhower “into doing everything we can get him to do, and when he does something good we give him a 21-gun salute.”48

After the salute, they prodded him again.

NOTES

1.  Elizabeth Armet, “Poll Analysis: Americans Lean More Conservative on Social Issues,” www.latimes.com, 18 June 2000 (accessed 27 Jan. 2003).

2.  Denyse Handler, letter to the editor, P.S., Oct.-Nov. 1981, 6.

3.  U.S. Constitution, article 1, sections 9 and 10.

4.  For Project Rachel, see www.hopeafterabortion.com or call (800) 5WE-CARE; for the Centurions (helping ex-abortion clinic staff and those who want to leave the clinics), see www.plam.org or call (651) 771-1500.

5.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Social Aims” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, vol. 8, 1917), 96.

6.  Howard Kurtz, “Airing on the Side of Caution,” Washington Post, 13 Jan. 1999, C-1 & C-7.

7.  Anne E. Redlinger, letter to the editor, Washington Times, 27 Oct. 1996, B-2.

8.  George Fox, quoted in Robert Lawrence Smith, A Quaker Book of Wisdom (New York:  Morrow, 1998), xi.

9.  Helen Alvare, “Communicating a C ulture of Life in a Sec ular Society,” conference speech, Washington, D.C., 24 March 2000, tape recording.

10. John Naughton, letter to the editor, Montgomery Journal, 12 June 1989, A-6.

11. Joseph R. Stanton, “A Pro-Life Spokesman Responds to J ulia Child,” Worcester (Mass.) Evening Gazette, 11 Aug. 1982, 15.

12.  Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861, in Abraham Lincoln, Great Speeches (New York: Dover Publications, 1991), 61.

13. Doris Gordon, interview by author, tape recording, 19 Dec. 1996.

14. “Right to Life Words — Semantics,” International Life Times, 14 Dec. 1979, citing Denyse Handler.

15. J ulianne Loesch Wiley, interview by author, tape recording, 15 Jan. 2003.

16. Gregg Cunningham, interview by author, tape recording, 15 Jan. 2003.  See, also, the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform web site at www.abortionno.com.

17. Edward J. Sheridan, “The Psychological Effects of Abortion: An Interview with Dr. Edward J. Sheridan,” interview by John G. Gatewood, Georgetown University Right to Life Journal 2 (Fall 1981), 1; Philip G. Ney and Marie A. Peeters-Ney, Abortion Survivors (Victoria, B.C.: Pioneer Publishing Ltd., 1998), 10, 24 & 37-38.

18. For examples of D & X line drawings, see American Medical News, 5 J uly 1993, 3; and Washington Post, 17 Oct. 1999, B-4.

19. U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Hearing on The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 1995, 104th Cong., lst Sess., 17 Nov. 1995, 17-21.

20. Gregg Cunningham acknowledged that line drawings are enough to turn some people against abortion, but said such drawings “certainly don’t reach the percentage that can be reached with the detailed photographs.”  Op. cit. (n. 16).

21. Ibid.

22. Yochi J. Dreazen, “Photos of Women Who Get Abortions Go Up on Internet,” Wall Street Journal, 28 May 2002, A-1 & A-8; and www.abortioncams.com, 20 Jan. 2003. Most abortionists seem to be male, which sho uld give both psychiatrists and feminists pause for thought.

23. Wiley interview, op. cit. (n. 15).

24. Doris Gordon interview, op. cit. (n. 13).

25. James Jackson Kilpatrick, “A Comment,” National Review, 25 May 1979, 680.

26. Corrine Brown, “The 24th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade,” Washington Times, 22 Jan. 1997, Roe v. Wade Special Advertising Supplement, 4.

27. Richard Cohen, “Element of Hypocrisy Is Part of Abortion Debate,” Washington Post, 22 March 1981, B-1.

28. Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life:  Writings on the Women’s Movement (New York: Random House, 1976), 12-13.

29. Pat Schroeder, with Andrea Camp and Robin Lipner, Champion of the Great American Family (New York: Random House, 1989), 28-33; and Pat Schroeder, 24 Years of House Work...and the Place Is Still a Mess: My Life in Politics (Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 1998), 111-112.

30. Kate Michelman, interview by Karen A. Schneider, in Karen A. Schneider, ed., Choices: Women Speak Out About Abortion ([Washington, D.C.]: NARAL Foundation, 1997), 48-51.

31. J ulianne Loesch Wiley, interview by author, tape recording, 31 Jan. 1998.

32. Serrin Foster, interview by author, tape recording, 22 Jan. 1998.

33. Helen Alvare, interview by author, tape recording, 16 Jan. 1998.

34. Sister Pa ula Vandegaer, interview by author, tape recording, 22 Sept. 1998.

35. Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven: Yale, 1995), 116, 284-285, 308, 315, 331; Lee Edwards, Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution (Washington: Regnery, 1995), 420-423, 445-446, 459, 460, 462-463. According to Edwards, the Goldwater daughter who had the long-ago abortion “admits that all three of her daughters have had abortions” (421).

36. George McGovern, Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism (New York: Villard/Random House, 1996), x, 64-68, 111, 118, 129. For Sen. McGovern’s voting record, see “Abortion Voting Records, U.S. Senate: 1973-80,” National Right to Life News, 13 Oct. 1980, supplement, A & C.

37. Judith Campbell Exner said she aborted a child by President John F. Kennedy when he was in the White House.  See Liz Smith, “The Exner Files,” Vanity Fair, Jan. 1997, 42-43. Gennifer Flowers said she aborted a child by William J. Clinton when he was attorney general of Arkansas. See Gennifer Flowers with Jacquelyn Draper, Gennifer Flowers: Passion and Betrayal (Del Mar, Calif.: Emery Dalton Books, 1995), 37-39.

38. J. Y. Smith, “A. J. Cronin, Writer of Best-Selling Novels, Is Dead at 84,” Washington Post, 10 Jan. 1981, B-10.

39. Cathy Dyson, “Abandoned, But Adopting Hope,” Washington Times, 25 Dec. 1999, B-1 & B-2.

40. Current Biography Yearbook 1997, 88-91; John McCaslin, “Inside the Beltway,” Washington Times, 7 Feb. 1997, A-8; and “Carson Scholars Fund” brochure, Towson, Md., n.d.

41. Sharon Johnson, “Disabled in Professions Grow,” New York Times, 18 J uly 1983, A-1 & A-10.

42. Shield of Roses newsletter, Glendale, Calif., Summer 2000, 2.

43. “106 Babies Saved Already This Year,” Pro-Life Action News (St. Pa ul, Minn.), Aug. 2002, 1.

44. Pa ul M ulligan, interview by author, tape recording, 4 March 2002.

45. Mary Krane Derr and others, ed., Prolife Feminism: Yesterday &                 Today (New York: S ulzburger & Graham, 1995); Sidney Callahan, “Abortion & the Sexual Agenda,” Commonweal 113, no. 8 (25 April 1986), 232-238; Tim O’Neil, “Society Must Offer More Help to Mothers, Feminists for Life President Says in Speech,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4 Nov. 1999, B-1 & B-4; www.feministsforlife.org.

46. George Weigel, Catholicism and the Renewal of American Democracy (New York: Pa ulist Press, 1989), 131-132.

47. Albert E. Avey, Handbook in the History of Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), 22.

48. Quoted in Ralph K. Huitt and Robert L. Peabody, Congress: Two Decades of Analysis (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 144.

The Human Life Foundation, Inc.
215 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York 10016