By Dave Andrusko

"Social networking sites are helping abortion-rights supporters and opponents fire up their grassroots in preparation for a big fight in the Senate over insurance coverage for abortions. Advocates on both sides have used Facebook, Twitter, text messages and new blogs to attract supporters and keep members informed about what's happening in Washington as the abortion issue has suddenly resurfaced as a hot topic in political debate."
     -- From the publication, the Hill, November 27.

Good evening. I trust you had a great Thanksgiving. As you well know, there is much going on this week, beginning with Senate consideration of amendments to a sweeping health care restructuring bill proposed by Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act."

(For full details on the status of the bill and how you can contact your two United States Senators, go to http://nrlactioncenter.com.)

Pro-abortion Congresswoman Louise Slaughter

There is a certain irony to several converging storylines. Pro-abortion President Barack Obama, just ten months ago the darling of the media elite and essentially incapable (or so we were led to believe) of making mistakes, is in a heap of trouble.  Yet for all his widespread difficulties, Obama (and the pro-abortion Democratic congressional leadership) holds on to its plans to use health care restructuring to advance the abortion agenda like a bulldog. To change metaphors, Obama is trying to right the ship by weighing it down with the anchor of abortion–-a really bad idea.

But if Obama, as President, is demonstrating none of the leadership abilities his followers imputed to him when he was a candidate, there is a part of his campaign legacy that grows stronger by the day: the use of social networking.

When we think of social networking, "Twitter" and "Facebook" come immediately to mind.

According to Computerworld.com, "Just a few weeks after the New Oxford American Dictionary announced that "unfriend is its 2009 Word of the Year, the Global Language Monitor announced that "Twitter" is the top word of 2009 based on its annual global survey of English words and phrases that appear in the media and online." The use of all social networking, but especially Twitter and Facebook, has "exploded" in the last year.

National Right to Life has embraced social networking with tremendous vigor, as the quote from the article in the Hill suggests.

We have a growing number of "friends" on our various Facebook pages, a couple of blogs (this one and www.stoptheabortionagenda.com), and a Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/nrlc).

The impact? Well, I couldn't say it any better than NARAL's political director.  Social media "allows us to go much broader with our message," Elizabeth Shipp, told the Hill. "We can get out there in a much bigger way."

Indeed. Let me use an example I am most familiar with--Today's News & Views. Thousands of people receive it Monday through Friday in their inboxes.

When readers like the contents--hopefully most of the time--they just go back to www.nrlc.org.

There at the top, under "Stay Informed," is Today's News & Views. Once you click on that you have the ability to link this to any of your social networks from AIM Share to YouMob. The impact is enormous, the cost only a few minutes of your time.

And for the record, that is just the tip of the informational iceberg. For over 36 years NRLC has published National Right to Life News, which you can subscribe to at http://nrlc.org/news/subscribe.html.

In addition NRLC maintains a variety of websites tailored to specific areas of focus within the Right to Life movement, such as educational information, or political and legislative action. For grassroots leaders, there is the chapter website (www.nrlchapters.org) where chapters can log in to access useful content and resources. www.prolifeperspective.com serves up information on NRLC's weekly radio broadcast. www.abortionresearch.us is the official website of the Association for Interdisciplinary Research in Values and Social Change, the professional organization of researchers and educators who turn out scholarly work on the life issues in academic fields.

Furthermore NRLC's Communication's department maintains a blog on media issues and important news articles at www.nrlcomm.wordpress.com. The Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics maintains a blog on important events in the fight against medical rationing and to ensure end of life care. (The blog can be found at www.powellcenterformedicalethics.blogspot.com.)

And NRLC will soon launch our newest website, www.praytoendabortion.org, which will be a website for religious outreach and prayer in the Right to Life movement.

You get the point, of course. Thanks to the new landscape of informational technology, we can get vitally important information out very quickly to hundreds of thousands of people All we need is the "middle man"--you.

Be sure to use these informational venues, particular Today's News & Views and http://nrlactioncenter.com/

Part One