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NRL News
Keeping
the Plight of the Unborn Child in The following remarks were delivered at NRL Convention 2007 by the Rev. Dennis Day, NRLC Treasurer. National Right to Life believes that it is a good thing that the U.S Supreme Court has upheld the ban on the type of abortion defined by Congress as Partial-Birth Abortion in the Gonzales v. Carhart decision. For the first time, since the Roe v. Wade ruling of 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court has disallowed the use of an abortion method. We believe that the debate surrounding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the passage of the act, the subsequent litigation, as well as the Supreme Court decision itself, have served to educate many, many Americans about both the humanity of the unborn child and the horrific nature of types of abortion. We further believe that this education and the public debate will lead to the saving of lives by causing some persons to recoil from abortion — persons who otherwise would have remained more ignorant of and oblivious to its evil and ugly nature. We also note that the pro-abortion movement viewed passage of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and the subsequent Supreme Court decision upholding it as a major defeat and serious threat to their goal of maintaining Roe v. Wade and unlimited abortion on demand. National Right to Life also believes that legislative actions such as parental notice and/or consent laws, women’s-right-to-know informed consent laws, legislation seeking to make women aware of the pain unborn children may feel in an abortion, laws seeking to have women considering abortion shown sonograms of their unborn child, and laws to restrict or eliminate public funding of abortion to the extent possible serve to reduce the number of abortions and save lives. We believe they also serve to keep the abortion debate and plight of the unborn child in the forefront of America’s consciousness and serve to educate her conscience. We believe that our struggles to pass such legislation as is possible now, brings closer the day when Roe v. Wade is reversed, thus making possible the passage of laws directly prohibiting abortion. National Right to Life opposes abortion; and we feel that it is our obligation to support those legislative initiatives which are possible now in order to save as many lives as can be saved now. We applaud the efforts of all pro-lifers at the state and local chapter level who have worked, and are working, so hard to do this. We believe that these efforts together with the other educational efforts of National Right to Life and its state affiliates and local chapters and the efforts of Crisis Pregnancy Centers have contributed in a very major way to the reduction in the annual number of abortions from a high of approximately 1.6 million to a current level of approximately 1.3 million. We mourn the loss of any child to abortion and will continue our efforts to further reduce the number of abortions as we work for the time that direct prohibitions of abortion are possible. We do not consider approximately 300,000 babies not being aborted annually an insignificant thing; rather, we give thanks for it and applaud it. |