Editor's note. Part Two are excerpts from a speech pro-life champion Rep. Chris Smith gave to young people at the convention. You will want to read it.

The title of William McGurn's piece in this morning's Wall Street Journal is "The NAACP and Black Abortions." It is not an attack on the nation's oldest civil rights organization for its position on abortion. McGurn writes more in sorrow than in anger.

He juxtaposes two images from the NAACP's Monday gathering. On the one hand, "the first African-American to head the presidential ticket of a major party was on hand" at the organization's 99^th annual conference. McGurn chose not to belabor what he knows as well as you and I do: that Sen. Barack Obama is a down-the-line abortion advocate whom the Abortion Establishment dreams of having reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Instead he contrasts the warm welcome for Obama with something that "went mostly unmentioned": a "protest by African-American pro-lifers – many NAACP members – who can't understand why America's most venerated civil rights organization turns a blind eye to what they say is the abortion industry's practice of targeting poor minority neighborhoods."

Those protestors included Dr. Alveda King, a niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King. Alveda King's testimony is riveting and comes from the repentant heart of a woman who had two abortions and was contemplating a third.

"I remember when I was pregnant and considering a third abortion," she says. "I went to Daddy King [her grandfather and Martin Luther King's father]. He told me, 'that's a baby, not a blob of tissue.' Unfortunately, 14 million African-Americans are not here today because of legalized abortion. It's as if a plague swept through America's cities and towns and took one of every four of us."

Almost all Americans have probably heard the depressing statistics about the number of young black men behind bars. But how many have heard the deeply distressing news that "Black women are 4.8 times as likely as non-Hispanic white women to have an abortion," according to, the Guttmacher Institute, formerly Planned Parenthood's think-tank? A tiny percentage, I'd guess, could even imagine that while about one in five white pregnancies ends in abortion, 'it's nearly one out of every two for African-Americans."

The second contrast McGurn draws is between the machinery of death that is the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and those typically small, hand-to-mouth women-helping centers who work with women and girls to find life-affirming alternatives.

You have on the one side PPFA, a conglomerate with revenues now exceeding $1 billion, which each year kills more and more unborn babies often times with the financial assistance of state dollars. On the other side you have maternity homes and crisis pregnancy centers (frequently the target of politicians in PPFA's pocket), who depend almost entirely on the kindness of strangers. A David and Goliath battle if ever there was one.

McGurn concludes by wondering what would happen if the NAACP "used its voice and resources to ensure that, beside all those Planned Parenthood clinics located in our minority neighborhoods, African-American women could find another kind of place," places "where a scared young pregnant woman could carry her baby to term, complete her education, train for a new job, and be treated with the love and respect that a mother needs and deserves."

Planned Parenthood's doors, alas, are open, beckoning young women to give into their fears. But McGurn hopes that the NAACP might work for a society where a second door would be open as well.

"[T]he other would lead to people whose business is of a vastly different order: welcoming these children into the world, and getting their moms the help they need to live lives of purpose and dignity."

You can read McGurn's column at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121607809378852557.html?mod=googlenews_wsj.

Please send your thoughts to daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

Part Two -- Changing America One Heart at a Time