VSHL Anniversary:

Virginia Celebrates 35 Years of Pro-Life Advocacy

By Tom Bliley

Editor's note. This first appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch and is reprinted with permission.

The 1960s were tumultuous times. John F. Kennedy assassinated. Martin Luther King assassinated. College kids gunned down on their campus. Horrific deaths of soldiers and entire villages in the Vietnam War. All clearly reported and much of it in full view in living rooms across America. No Virginian, no American could ignore the deaths or the consequences.

Behind the obvious darkened clouds over our country was another storm quietly brewing that wasn't being played out in full view. This quiet, under-the-radar activity ultimately would bring more death and collateral destructive consequences than all of America's conflicts and wars throughout its history.

A few Americans--Virginians in fact--were the first in the nation to try to hold back such ominous darkness, and to warn all Americans of the impending consequences. Under the seeming altruism of helping women and curbing the population, several states (even a health official in Virginia) were calling for legalizing abortion.

In the United States until the mid-1960s, Virginia--and all states, with few exceptions--prohibited abortion unless the mother's life was endangered. Thirty-five years ago this year, five years before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on demand for the full nine months of pregnancy, these few Virginians formed the first state pro-life organization in the country. They named it the Virginia Society for Human Life (VSHL).

The year was 1967. The 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision declaring a right to abortion literally until the day of birth galvanized a national pro-life movement. VSHL, now with chapters across the state, joined statewide organizations in other states to form the National Right to Life Committee, becoming the Virginia affiliate.

Given an understanding of the slippery-slope consequences of the legal abrogation of the sanctity of all human life, issues of infanticide and euthanasia were included (never even imagining the Kevorkian activities 25 years later).

Keeping with their Virginia heritages, the founders of this first state pro-life organization, the "pro-life forerunners," began reasserting the founding principle that birthed our nation. Earlier Virginia minds--Jefferson, Madison, Mason, and Henry--recognized the self-evident truth that "all men [the born and yet to be born] are endowed by their Creator with inalienable [albeit immutable] rights--the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Since these rights are inalienable, VSHL asserted they must be afforded to each individual life regardless of size, age, race, ethnicity, gender, circumstances of conception, or degree of perfection.

These forerunners helped write the continuing story of Virginia, a story that speaks of courage, of forward thinking (yes, prophetic thinking), and action--the same action that not only birthed a nation but forged its destiny. Were Virginia's actions through history always consistent with the Declaration of Independence's self-evident principle of the right to life and liberty for all? Absolutely not!

The mid-19th Century abandoned that principle with slavery. The mid-20th Century abandoned that principle with segregation and the recently unveiled eugenic atrocity of forced sterilizations.

The 1967 Virginia pro-life forerunners passionately educated and warned a state and nation that the abandonment of the eternal verities of life and liberty, endowed by our Creator, would reap a dark whirlwind of consequences.

To date, there have been more than 40 million abortions in America. That is one abortion every 20 seconds. Congress is still battling over the infanticide abortion, "partial-birth" procedure. State legislatures still argue over the legality of allowing one parent to merely be notified of a daughter's abortion, and whether or not she should be informed of the

consequences and alternatives. Deceived with euphemisms and given no real choice, young frightened women have become the victims along with their now sacrosanct right-to-abortion culture. The marketing strategy to keep this culture viable was to take the light off the baby and refocus it onto the "choice."

"Evil hates the light lest its deeds be exposed!"

On October 4 we pro-life citizens of Virginia are gathering for a celebration and thanksgiving for the courageous Virginians who, 35 years ago, saw the dark cumulus clouds forming and took action to shed light into the darkness. Their action has saved many lives. Even though the current statistics are still staggering, nationwide polls do show a definite shift away from the abortion-on-demand ethic.

I want to give a special thank you to two of those Virginia forerunners. First to Joe Gartlan, who in 1967 co-founded VSHL and authored an in-depth and provocative position paper on abortion policy in Virginia. Quoting from that article: "Abortion is so radical a solution to the stress situations of pregnant women as to constitute a declaration of the bankruptcy of society's resources . . . ." Several years later, Joe was elected as a Democrat to the Virginia Senate and served with distinction in that capacity for more than three decades.

The second Virginia forerunner I want to mention is Geline Williams. She and her husband Alex were among the handful of co-founders of VSHL. Geline later was elected to the Richmond City Council and served as its much-respected Mayor. She also has been the revered chairman of the board for the National Right to Life Committee for almost 20 years.

Thomas Jefferson said in 1809, "The care of human life, and not its destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government." Jefferson's Virginia holds the distinction of many "firsts." I am proud of my long affiliation with an ever-so-important "first," the pro-life activities of the Virginia Society for Human Life.

They have epitomized the stirring words of President Ronald Reagan: "There is no cause more important for preserving freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings. . . . May we soon rejoice in the day when reverence for human life is enshrined as surely in our laws as it is in our hearts."

Tom Bliley is a former Richmond mayor and Virginia congressman.