NRLC '99 Prepares Movement for the New Millennium

By Dave Andrusko

When convention director Jacki Ragan stopped to tally up the educational fare that would be available to attendees to NRLC '99, just for a moment an unwelcome thought crossed her mind: burnout.

After all, the 27th annual convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, included 72 workshops, four general sessions, a prayer breakfast, a banquet, an oratory contest, and separate conventions for teens and for college students, not to mention a separate track for religious outreach and still another for chapter development. Was it possible to have too much of a good thing?

She needn't have worried.

"In all the conventions I've attended or directed, none has gone as smoothly, none seemed better received by the over 1,000 grassroots pro-lifers who came," Ragan told NRL News. Her intuition was buttressed by many items, beginning with hundreds of evaluation sheets that revealed great satisfaction.

"Also, when you have over a thousand people, you would naturally expect a fair number to be milling around in the halls at any given time," she said. "But the corridors were virtually empty during the workshops, which were filled with people who stayed to the very end."

It was the same with the four general sessions, prayer breakfast, and banquet, which featured Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Greenberg, Fr. Mike Mannion, Mary Jane Owen, and a host of experts on euthanasia and electoral politics.

"It was as if people were using every moment to talk over what they had just learned," Ragan said. "Five minutes before a general session was scheduled to begin, the room was empty. Ten minutes later the room was packed."

In addition, the prayer breakfast was an absolute sellout and tape sales were very brisk (for ordering information, see page 28).

Looking ahead to the year 2000, the theme of NRLC '99 was "Building a New Millennium for Life." But as a number of people observed, there was a subtitle. As pro-lifers make the womb a safe haven for unborn children we must also send the message "It Is Safe to Come Home" to those who have been a party to the tragic decision to abort. Over and over and over the voices of speakers filled with compassion drove home the point that the pro-life movement is an inclusive agency of social justice, whose mission extends beyond building an America where every unborn child is protected in law to creating a safe haven for women who have had abortions.

This love for the secondary victims of abortion went even further. As Fr. Mannion explained, far from the media caricature of uncaring judgmentalists, the Movement is and must be a tenderhearted band of men and women whose program for turning around America is to condemn the violence of abortion at the same time it reaches out to touch the humanity that is buried in the inner reaches of even practicing abortionists.

The convention got off on the best foot possible with a stirring address by Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Greenberg lauded the Movement's staying power, its diversity, and its keen understanding that evil's nature is to spread.

Evil "becomes ordinary, profitable, banal," he said. "Abortion today, euthanasia tomorrow, eugenics next in our brave new cloned world."

But he also reminded pro-lifers that they have an unexpected source of strength.

"In this fight, some of us have forgotten that we have an ally in the conscience of our adversaries. We should never cease appealing to it. Those on the other side of this issue are for life, too. They just may not know it yet."

Our task is to keep reminding them of this. If we do, Greenberg concluded, "Once again We Shall Overcome."

The welcoming theme dominated Mary Jane Owen's closing banquet remarks. A disability rights activist and philosopher, she challenged pro-lifers to fight a culture more and more influenced by a mentality that has little use for the "imperfect."

She told a powerful story of a young political refugee who had come to her. She had been raped but did not abort her baby. Her child was born with tiny hands attached to her shoulders and something obviously wrong with her legs.

Counseled to abandon her child, she came to Owen, who advised her to come to know her baby, to name her baby. That was seven years ago.

Recently that child and her mother came to visit Owen. The child was brilliant, bright, and very happy. Her mom's English, once halting, was now quite good. She was married to a man who loved both her and her daughter, Owen said. The little girl's mother is an advocate for all children with disabilities in her area.

"Will there be a place for this child to fulfill her potential in the new millennium?" Owen asked. "Will there?"

In between Greenberg's opening address and Owen's closing remarks the convention addressed every conceivable phase of the pro-life struggle. There were a series of workshops on reaching out to the religious community, including a very welcome discussion of the gradual changes coming about in the Jewish community because of the debate over partial-birth abortion (see pages 21 - 22).

Representatives from local chapters were the beneficiaries of a three-day tutorial on how to prepare NRLC's 3,000 chapters for 2000 and beyond.

A series of workshops along with a general session titled "Is Your Grandmother Next?" explored in a sensitive and highly informative manner the multiple dimensions of the euthanasia threat, with emphasis on a brilliantly executed campaign in Michigan that defeated an effort to legalize assisted suicide last year and the dangers posed by managed care.

Another area of emphasis was computers and the potential revolutionary impact of the World Wide Web. For 26 years pro-lifers have bemoaned the bias of the major media. But as speaker after speaker confirmed, the web provides an unparalleled opportunity to bypass an unsympathetic media and present an unfiltered pro-life message to millions of people around the globe.

Ragan closed her interview with NRL News with two reminders. The first is that tapes of all the sessions are available at nominal cost from NRLC (see ad, page 28).

The second is that NRLC 2000 will be held in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., June 29-July 1.

"Please begin making plans to be there," she said. "The right to life movement will be pivotal to the decisions of 2000 which will set the stage for what happens in the abortion arena for at least the next two decades."