The Pro-Life Movement's Future

Posted by Tom McFeely

Thursday, April 02, 2009 10:11 AM

“When you’re out of political power, you start thinking about new ways to do things,” says Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote.org. “How do we continue to be relevant?”

Burch makes that comment in an April 1 Wall Street Journal article that spotlights his organization’s pro-life Barack Obama video.

The brief but powerful video, which according to WSJ has been viewed nearly 1.8 million times since being posted on YouTube in January, shows an ultrasound image of an unborn baby while a written narration describes how Obama’s mother chose life for the future president by not aborting him before birth.

The WSJ article, entitled “Facing Tough Washington Climate, Abortion Foes Move Debate Online,” situates the CatholicVote.org video in the contemporary political context of the United States, where the pro-abortion Democratic Party controls the White House.

Along with the CatholicVote.org video — the first in a series of such biographical videos the organization plans to release — the WSJ article cites an initiative by the Susan B. Anthony List that offers $2,000 in prizes for creative videos that attract new supporters to the pro-life cause.

Another online effort noted by the WSJ is a series of videos posted by Priests for Life, in which Priests for Life national director Father Frank Pavone explains how abortions are performed, using a plastic model of an unborn child.

It also highlights the Live Action project organized by UCLA student Lila Rose, who “has developed an online following by shooting grainy undercover videos inside Planned Parenthood clinics across the nation,” the WSJ notes. “Ms. Rose poses as a young teen impregnated by a much-older boyfriend and films her conversations with staff. Using edited footage, she accuses Planned Parenthood of failing to report her as a victim of statutory rape. The effect is to present her, and by extension her fellow antiabortion activists, as crusading protectors of young girls.”

Pro-life leaders agree these innovative approaches are a necessity, if the pro-life movement hopes to advance its cause despite the icy political climate in the nation’s capital.

“We’re getting beyond the hackneyed ways of holding up posters with graphic pictures of abortion,” Legionary Father Thomas Berg, director of the Westchester Institute for Ethics and the Human Person, told the WSJ. “That just doesn’t work.”

Filed under catholicvote.org, planned parenthood, pro-life