Pro-Life and Abused

It's no secret that I am adamantly pro-life, but when I was asked to be on the host committee for next Friday's 2004 Annual Ball for Life, I hesitated because I hate to dress up. When I visited the site at www.ballforlife.org and noticed that the fund-raiser was black tie, I was ready to turn down the offer. Reading further, I saw that my favorite charities would benefit from the affair scheduled for May 14 at the Racquet and Tennis Club at 370 Park Ave. Good Counsel Homes, Expectant Mother Care, Birthright, and other prolife organizations are all very worthwhile causes that depend on support from donors to save the lives of the unborn. Most of the people I've met while involved with the pro-life groups are quite pleasant. They are not angry and crude. The March for Women's Lives, which took place on April 25 in D.C., was the flip side of the March for Life I attended on January 22. Although the winter crowd was probably just as large as the "hundreds of thousands" that converged for the April rally, it wasn't covered much by the mainstream press. Most of the signs back then read simply: "Respect Life" or "God Bless George W. Bush." In contrast, many of the April 25 rally signs were not fit for publication. A group of about 500 women from "Silent No More" went to counter demonstrate at the April rally, and one member named Annie said she was shocked by the hate-filled name-calling that the group endured. This group is made up of women who have suffered an abortion and they carried signs that read simply: "I regret my abortion." Annie said the marchers threw eggs and spit at them. I've also been getting e-mails from pro-lifers relating the story of a Father Reynolds who stood alone for hours on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the Navy Memorial. He was cursed and spat on and had to endure obscene gestures from the marchers. One woman allegedly stood in front of him, made the sign of the cross, and then thrust her hips at him, then grabbed her crotch. Signs the marchers carried condemned Barbara Bush and Pope John Paul II's mother for not having aborted their children. Some of the marchers just thought it was nice to keep shouting the F word out loud. Such class. Speeches by celebrities and politicians were angry and defensive and frankly just plain stupid. Rep. Maxine Waters apparently wasn't even sure which march she was at. She said, "I have to march because my mother couldn't have an abortion." Many of the marchers wore Kerry buttons and signs, but I wonder if they were at all aware of what his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, told Newsweek magazine. She was quoted as saying: "My belief - and I maybe am very wrong - is that women, generally speaking, do not want to have abortion." She also said abortion is the stopping of a life and that she also does not believe abortion is a nothing. Whoopi Goldberg waved a coat hanger in the air and shouted, " This will never again be the choice of any woman." Oh, Whoopi, don't tell me you haven't heard the truth about those pre-Roe v. Wade coat-hanger deaths? The co-founder of National Abortion and Reproduction Action League, Bernard Nathanson, is now pro-life and he confessed that Naral completely fabricated figures like 5,000 to 10,000 illegal abortion deaths a year. "I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it," he wrote in his book, "Aborting America." According to the United States Bureau of Vital Statistics, the official total death due to illegal abortion in 1972 was 39. But let's not quibble with the truth. Even Roe v. Wade began with the canard that Jane Roe had been raped. This was just another lie used to promote a procedure that has caused more traumatic injury to women than any unwanted pregnancy. Although I didn't attend last month's march, I'm not surprised by the anger and hate that spewed from the marchers against the pro-lifers. I witnessed it several years ago, when I participated in a march down Madison Avenue led by Cardinal O'Connor. All we were doing was saying the rosary as we marched to the first legal abortion clinic in Manhattan. The crowd that jeered us, and their hateful curses, made me feel as if I were in a 1960s civil rights march in Selma. Women bared their breasts and cursed at us from their apartment windows. One pro-lifer compared what she saw in Washington as something out of the "Exorcist," when the demon-possessed Megan hissed at the priests. But these weren't evil people who were rallying desperately for their freedom of choice. Evil, however, can use good people to do its dirty work and all we can hope is that these women wake up and realize that the choice they find so precious involves the killing of a human life. Anyhow, I will be donning fancy dress for next Friday's Ball and if you can't join me, I hope you'll help support these worthy causes. Who knows? Maybe Teresa Heinz Kerry will join us.