NRL News
Page 2
June 2010
Volume 37
Issue 6

Created with a Purpose

By Dave Andrusko

There are ordinarily natural ebbs and flows to our involvement in this great battle to save the littlest Americans, but there is little evidence we will be taking our foot off the accelerator between now and November. Unceasing effort on behalf of those who count on us is both our moral obligation and our great privilege.

For the fortunate, there was a springboard that helped launch them into a busy summer and fall.

By the time many of you read this edition of the “pro-life newspaper of record,” upwards of a thousand hard-core grassroots pro-lifers will have come to Pittsburgh to attend NRLC’s three-day annual education fest and gone home primed to touch, teach, and motivate their fellow citizens. The common denominator to all these great times together is that you come away refreshed and re-invigorated.

But you can have the next best thing to being there. Be sure to come each day to Today’s News & Views (http://www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/) and National Right to Life News Today (www.nationalrighttolifenews.org) to read excerpts from the workshops, general sessions, Prayer Breakfast, and closing Banquet—and to order CDs.

As we look ahead we will be building on the last few months where pro-lifers in many state legislatures waged successful campaigns to enact protective legislation. By irrigating the landscape with truth, compassion, and impeccably accurate information, you are making headway even in states that have been legislatively arid for decades. (See page 9)

What an agenda we have, you and the staff of National Right to Life. With a Congress saturated with pro-abortion Democrats and a White House occupied by a man who each morning breathes in PPFA’s anti-life ethos, it’s been a rough 17 months for us. But if we know anything, we know that real change is in the air.

Pro-lifers have set their sights on taking back territory lost to candidates who cajoled parts of the public into believing that they weren’t “that bad” on abortion. The embedded moral message was that there are “more important” issues on the table than whether we silence 1.3 million voices each and every year.

Politics is not everything, but shoring up pro-life numbers in the House and Senate is a necessary precondition—a predicate, if you will—to stymieing the Obamas and Pelosis and Reids. (See story, page six) They are not through with their radical agenda!

For example, we were told throughout the long health care battle, don’t worry, “ObamaCare” is not British slang for love of nationalized health care. And then Obama nominates Donald Berwick, M.D., a pediatrician and a professor at Harvard Medical School to run the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a colossal bureaucracy with 43,500 employees and an annual budget of $780 billion (billion with a “b”).

His nomination confirmed the worst fears of opponents of ObamaCare (fears adamantly dismissed at the time). To take just one example, in a rhapsodic essay he wrote for the British Medical Journal in July 2008, Berwick gushed, “I am romantic about the NHS [the British National Health Service]. I love it. All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at healthcare in my own country.” (See Burke Balch’s story on the back cover.)

So as part of revisiting, revising, and reversing the many already existing anti-life components of ObamaCare, we must thwart the nomination of officials like Berwick. What else?

We are firmly opposing the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by the retirement of behind-the-scenes pro-abortion mastermind Justice John Paul Stevens. You’ll come away from the story that begins on page one realizing that Kagan is too clever by half.

Not only are there signs of personal antipathy towards pro-lifers, Kagan has a history of strategizing with people like pro-abortion President Bill Clinton to formulate policies that are supposedly filled with abortion “compromises” but are, in fact, packaged like IEDs to have maximum anti-life impact. She has also clearly signaled her general support for an activist, results-oriented approach to constitutional law, the kind of freelance jurisprudence that gave us Roe v. Wade in the first place.

But, for pro-abortionists, it is never enough to have the numbers to ram through their own agenda. They count it a day wasted if they fail to come up with some new way to stifle the free speech of pro-lifers. Enter the cynically misnamed “DISCLOSE Act.”

NRLC correctly describes H.R. 5175 as a “bullying political power grab,” which is “not a curb on corruption, but itself a type of corruption—a corruption of the lawmaking process, by which incumbent lawmakers employ the threat of criminal sanctions, among other deterrents, to reduce the amount of private speech regarding the actions of the lawmakers themselves.” The story on page one gives you the whys and wherefores of this assault on the First Amendment and shows you how you can share your disagreement with your elected officials.

Please be sure to read this edition of NRL News with particular care. We have an entire section (pages 12 - 14) devoted to how Planned Parenthood is re-engineering its corporate model to fatten its bottom line by immensely increasing the number of aborted babies.

Likewise, pages 7-11 remind us that NRLC and its state affiliates are rearing up a powerful new generation of pro-lifers. Nothing—NOTHING—so frightens our benighted opposition as much as the undeniable pro-life surge among young people. We are not allowing this great opportunity to pass us by.

That’s what NRLC’s intern program, its Academy, and state pro-life camps such as Wisconsin’s Camp Esther and Camp Nehemiah are all about. There is a natural coefficient between being reared in the Movement and later assuming leadership.

When I meet these kids at NRL Conventions and I see the way their lives have been transformed, I am reminded of the contrast C.S. Lewis drew between paint “which is merely laid on the surface,” and dye or stain “which soaks right through.” The changes we see are not cosmetic; these kids are new creatures, through and through.

Joleigh Little is talking about these young people, whom she loves so dearly, but her words apply to pro-lifers of all ages: “We live in difficult times. There are a lot of uncertainties in the world. But of one thing we can be absolutely certain. Every life is precious and is created with a purpose. YOU were created with a purpose. Perhaps a part of that purpose is to save lives. To make a difference. To stand up for the truth in a world that would rather look the other way.”