WASHINGTON —The fanfare over President Barack Obama’s second public inauguration ceremony Jan. 21 briefly overshadowed the 40th anniversary of what future generations may well consider a far more momentous event: the 1973 Supreme Court decisions of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton that removed the right of state legislatures to ban abortion. (Roe did so for the first three months of pregnancy, Doe for the rest.)
After four decades of heated debate over Roe and Doe, popular opinion remains divided on the issue. According to a new poll from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Americans don’t like abortion on demand, but they want to keep Roe.
The poll found that 63% of Americans don’t want Roe overturned by the Supreme Court, while only 29% want it thrown out, virtually the same as 20 years ago, when Pew first asked this question (the split then was 60%-34%).
Also showing little movement was public opinion on the morality of abortion, with 47% deeming it immoral, and only 13% considering it morally acceptable (in line with a 52%-12% response in Pew’s 2006 survey).
Yet the lack of movement on public attitudes towards Roe v. Wade is far from discouraging to America’s pro-life leadership — some because they take a very long view about its repeal; others because they say Pew’s findings distort the real picture; and most because they believe the key picture is one of a grassroots pro-life movement experiencing membership growth and increasing impact.
“The pro-life movement is amazing,” said Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM). “It is so broad and so deep. It is going ahead on so many fronts: the laws being passed in state legislatures, the medical research into the development of the unborn in the womb, the development of ultrasound to show the baby in utero.”
Added Shawn Carney, co-founder of the 40 Days for Life vigil. “Since we started in 2004, we have grown from one city in Texas to 482 cities in 15 countries and 50 states. Over half the abortion facilities in America have closed, and pregnancy-crisis centers outnumber abortion centers three to one.”
The Aging Abortion Lobby
The recent resignation of Nancy Keenan as head of Pro-Choice America (formerly the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) was cited by both Carney and Ruse as evidence of the other side’s discouragement. The Washington Post reported the resigning leader as saying, “If the pro-choice movement is to successfully defend abortion rights, it needs more young people in leadership roles, including hers.”
Three years earlier, Keenan had accidently encountered the annual March for Life, which brings a reported 200,000 pro-life Americans to Washington each year (on Friday, Jan. 25, this year). “I just thought, 'My gosh,'” she told Newsweek, “'they are so young. There are so many of them, and they are so young.'” Keenan indicated that her organization had spent the last three years developing a new marketing campaign to reach young people, soon to be unveiled.
Pro-life leaders such as Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, and Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, say the Pew poll failed to reflect accurately the opposition of most Americans to most abortions.
Doerflinger cited Gallup polling since 1994 indicating an increasing majority of Americans want either no or few abortions.
He said, “The way Pew asked the question would lead people to think overturning Roe and Doe would make all abortions illegal. In fact, it would just free up the democratic process and allow legislatures to decide the issue.”
Said Donohue, “Pew just shows that people don’t know what Roe v. Wade does.”
The Intensity Gap
Leaders were more impressed by another Pew finding because it supports what both they and their opponents have reported: the “intensity gap.” Pew reported that 38% of those who wanted to overturn Roe believed it to be a “critical” issue, but only 9% of those who opposed overturning Roe felt it to be critical.
This dovetails with Pro-Choice America’s own 2010 poll result showing 51% of pro-life supporters under 30 deemed the issue “very important.” Only 26 % of pro-abortion supporters under 30 felt equally strongly.
Dave O’Steen, executive director of National Right to Life, said, “We have a grassroots structure they can’t match. There are simply more people coming out to save babies than standing up for killing them.” Added 40 Days for Life’s Carney: “You can’t pay people to run 40 Days for Life vigils. They only happen because of a huge commitment.”
Opinion was divided on the direction the Supreme Court might take with future challenges to Roe and Doe. Joe Scheidler, national director of the Pro-Life Action League, said the Supreme Court was so unpredictable that he was no longer worried about that.
Doerflinger, meanwhile, acknowledged that Obama could significantly alter the court’s makeup by replacing any pro-life justices that might retire over the next four years with pro-abortion-rights justices.
“Progress in these areas moves at a glacial pace, but I can take comfort in belonging to an operation [the Catholic Church] that deals in centuries.”
Doerflinger added that the process of undoing Roe and Doe began in 1980, in Harris v. McRae, when the Supreme Court allowed governments to withhold funding for abortion. Additionally, the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, while “not the big win we hoped for,” did allow existing restrictions on abortion to stand.
Chipping Away
O’Steen said that National Right to Life is vitally involved in efforts to get incrementally restrictive laws passed in many state legislatures. O’Steen thinks this is the only approach likely to lead eventually to the end of abortion.
“The smart people are chipping away at Roe and Doe until they collapse of their own weight,” he said.
Leaders surveyed by the Register agree that one thing the Pew poll does reveal is a pressing need to educate the public and especially the young outside the pro-life camp, who are not so much pro-abortion as totally ignorant of the facts of life — and death.
Carney said the Pew results show “most people are not taking abortion seriously. They think it is immoral but don’t want to make it illegal. They need to be confronted with the reality. This needs to happen at the grassroots level.”
C-FAM’s Ruse agreed. “Education is needed. Most people are shocked when they find out we have abortion on demand for nine months.”
Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, believes that “we need to get more graphic with people and help them face the truth, even though it makes people angry.” A Priests for Life initiative will place explicit descriptions of abortion procedures on its website, some taken from medical textbooks.
Priests for Life already has organized the Silent No More campaign, which puts forward women who have had abortions to discuss the impact the procedure has had on them.
Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, says her organization will concentrate on highlighting the role of Planned Parenthood, which she notes performs a third of America’s abortions, and on showing young people what unborn children look like at the early stages of pregnancy to highlight their humanity. “They [abortion lobbyists] want you to believe the fetus is just a blob.”
Moving Beyond Abortion
But Helen Alvaré, a law professor at George Mason University and former director of planning for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’s Pro-Life Secretariat, believes that the pro-life movement must move beyond abortion itself if it is to make meaningful progress.
“We’ve done that very well, but we have to go the demand side of abortion culture if we are to make more progress,” she said. “We have to change the whole current attitude that sex is like tennis — lots of fun but with no weight to it.”
Abortion and contraception have served “to remove the connection of sex to children and marriage,” Alvaré said, and “women have acceded to pressure from men that sex is the price of having a relationship.”
Said Alvaré, “We’ll be tarred and feathered for advising women to connect sex with marriage and children. But it is in the long-term interest of both women and men.”
Register correspondent Steve Weatherbe writes from Victoria, British Columbia.
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The Pew poll is worthless as far as determining whether the American public believes that our present abortion laws are acceptable, too restrictive or not restrictive enough. To determine the direction abortion policy should actually go, you need to consult polls that ask people at what point(s) in pre-natal development do they find abortion permissible (e.g. first trimester only, throughout all nine months of pregnancy), and under what circumstances (e.g. only in cases of rape or incest, only when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother, etc.)
What, are you nuts?
The pro-abortion movement is on the ascendancy just like the homosexual movement is.
One would have to have had their head buried in the sand not to have noticed that B. Hussein Obama and his Democratic Party ran on the most unabashed pro-abortion even. Yes, that Obama, the one the fools running Notre Dame honored. And of course, Catholic lined up to vote Democratic.
I am 70 years old and after the election of this pro abortion president for the second time, I was so upset at my fellow human beings including family members for encouraging more women to kill their babies! This man to me is so evil in his demonic choice to make sure, by increasing payment for the abortion industry, that more unborn children are murdered by the one person who should be laying down their lives to protect them!
After the death of my first wife over 20 years ago, I raised our three children including my Down syndrome daughter as a single father. I recently remarried. More needs to be done to assure parents with Down syndrome unborn babies that there is an alternative to abortion. The Catholic Church needs to do more work with the so-called special needs population, as a whole.
It is such a shame that so many catholics put Obama in the white house, I wish they could all read the life of St. Thomas More and how he stuck with the teaching of the catholic church and not give in to King Henry the v111, he lost his head but saved his soul. those that put him in the white house will be the blame for each child that is aborted and same sex marriage’s, they have put their approval on his believe’s. God comes first then country. Don’t be surprised at the thing to come in the next 4 long years.
Obama and the Marxist Democrat Party are clicking their champagne glasses celebrating their murder of 55 million + babies since 1973. Their thirst for blood is not quenched. They are doubling down giving Planned Parenthood over a 1/2 Billion dollars of Taxpayer money to kill even more babies. Around the country, Planned Parenthood has been open Abortion Super Centers where they can butcher a higher volume of babies at a time. Thank you 52% Catholic Voters who voted for this.
I am astonished at those who think the battle is lost because of this election. Any Catholic worth his weight in salt knows that the Catholic church is in age as a comparison of glaciers to 4 year presidencies.
OBama, allied with PP and Soros and Buffet and Spielberg and yada yada, is in love with eugenics, that mystical magical dream of these self-proclaimed members of the ‘super genes’ of the species, their fantasy to have country sized plantations for their near immortal length lives and for their descendants. Mortality doesn’t occur to them as they focus their megalomaniac minds on immortality.
Just one problem.
Any Catholic worth his weight in salt knows that we don’t lose the war. Whether the Catholic church is driven back into the catacombs, its church’s once again grabbed, its members martyred in the manner of Auschwitz as the eugenics global movement proceeds, it doesn’t matter.
The church is built on the blood of the martyrs.
The martyrs will be given grace at the moment they need it.
The church is promised to last until the end of time.
All of this moaning and bewailing (I am not immune) is just doubt. We are obliged to stand out as Christians in our joy. No, doing a jig is not obligatory, but in an age of pessimism, despair and deep dark doubt, we are the candles, the light. If we are wringing our hands or bringing up reformation sticking points or giving in to unrestrained finger pointing, we will not stand out for the many souls who will, courtesy of decades of religious teaching withheld from every venue, be blind and unable to find a path to take to hope. When we pray and offer God our lives humbly the countless acts of pride that derail us in our responses and in our activities, are dispelled. We do not need to show that we know the most because we know nothing, but we DO need to show that we love the most and that love surpasses all understanding because it springs from the Holy Spirit within us, not from ourselves alone.
Hearts and minds need to change. We are in an age of legalese and relativism and the insertion of pagan values into every venue. Why then do people keep harping on our ‘losing’? These venues ARE lost to us, but God never ever leaves all paths blocked. The heart and soul is not reached through media, through legislation, through legal windfalls. It is reached through prayer, humility and charity and those are evident in even the most restricted and voiceless of societies, witness Mother Theresa among the poorest of the poor or the Catholic priests being martyred in China, in Egypt, in the Sudan, in so many places.
Yes we love life and yes we are to fight for our own, but we are not to forget that that this world is just a testing ground and a short stop to establish where we are to head eternally.
I am a cradle Catholic, but I definitely lapsed and all of this devotion has just sprung like an ever more flowing fount from a start that I pinpoint as the moment three and a half years ago that a sick cat, her illness more than my jobless, meagre funded life could bear, drove me to say the rosary. Mother Mary never lets you go when you approach her with sincerity.
The cat, with days to live, thrived for 3+ more years without extensive medical care.
Suffering and sacrifice are all but driven out of the modern culture globally. This is an age where the martyrs will outnumber all others before. Do we really think that that means everyone else?
Courage is from grace and from outward focus. When we love others more than ourselves we do wondrous things through he who is our strength and our salvation.
God’s peace, fortitude and joy be with you,
Please accept my apologies for not reading carefully and for writing far more than one paragraph (this is mainly to the editors so you do not have to print this).
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