When it comes to defending human life on the national level, Washington, D.C., isn’t the only town in the game.

From its home base in Chicago, a combination law firm/educational organization has been working since before Roe v. Wade to educate the public on the evils of abortion and to help enact public policy that will protect life in all stages of development.

That group is Americans United for Life. It's a “national public-policy organization to change the laws and culture" of the United States in favor of life, according to Clarke Forsythe. He has been its president for the last eight years.

The group was launched in August 1971, Forsythe says, because “abortion was heating up as the life issue at that time.”

The group that founded the organization “wanted to take abortion beyond the ‘Catholic issue' it was being made into at that time,” he explains. People of many different professions and faiths joined the group then, and it remains ecumenical today.

Though it is not a household name, Americans United for Life has made an undeniable impact on the debate surrounding life issues around the country and even around the world.

Some 90% of the organization's legal work is done on the state level, according to Forsythe.

Kansas is one state that has benefited from the groups activity, according to Michael Farmer, executive director of the Kansas Catholic Conference. Farmer says he became aware that Americans United for Life had drafted some rights-of-conscience legislation. He entered the draft into the Kansas legislature and it made its way through the democratic process.

Nikolas Nikas, Americans United for Life's chief lawyer, along with Dorinda Bordlee and Denise Burke, the firm's other attorneys, went to Topeka to provide expert witness before the House and Senate committees that were considering the bill, Farmer says, adding that he “greatly appreciated" the support.

Unfortunately, the bill, which would have expanded the right for health-care providers to opt out of ethically unsound medical procedures, did not survive the Senate.

But Americans United for Life was more successful in Kansas on another bill. The Kansas House recently passed an Americans United for Life-drafted bill that places minimal regulations on abortion clinics by a veto-proof margin. It also passed the Senate but fell three votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto. The pro-abortion governor, Kathleen Sebelius, vetoed the measure, and observers say the bill is dead for this session.

Sebelius told the Topeka Courier-Journal, “I tend to feel very strongly that medical decisions should be made by licensed medical providers and overseen by licensed medical providers and not let politics or bureaucracy enter into what are very important health-care decisions.”

Even if the bill becomes law, it will most likely face the courts. That would be ironic, Farmer says, since veterinary clinics have more regulations than do abortion clinics. Currently, abortion businesses don’t even fall under the regulations governing outpatient surgical centers, says the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Peggy Long. “Everyone compares this to veterinary clinics,” Long adds. “But there's a movie theater in my district and all they serve is popcorn and pop. But they get regular visits from the health department.”

What is even more ironic, Nikas said, is that the Kansas bill uses Planned Parenthood's own internal regulations as its basis. That fact provided part of their testimony before the Kansas legislature.

If and when the case does go to court, Americans United for Life will be there to defend it.

All of this work, Nikas said, is well within the framework of Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on the value and inviolability of human life. Even in those bills that seem only to be limiting abortion, like the regulation bill in Kansas, the Holy Father writes, “In a case … when it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well-known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality. This does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects.”

Perhaps of greater impact, though, is the conscience-protection issue. Americans United for Life has been contacted by 41 states for that model legislation and it is moving forward in at least seven of those. Something similar has been introduced on the federal level in the form of the Abortion Nondiscrimination Act, which passed the House last year.

This legislation would be helpful in countering what are known as the “Pill Bills” — bills requiring hospitals to administer emergency contraception in cases of rape or incest. These are being pushed by the abortion lobby and have some Catholic hospitals in a quandary. The conscience-protection legislation would help with that, Bordlee has said.

Americans United for Life's work in this area has attracted attention from the Vatican. In fact, Nikas and Bordlee were invited to address a conference of the International Catholic Medical Association in Rome called “The Future of Obstetrics and Gynecology: The Fundamental Human Right to Practice and Be Trained According to Conscience" in 2001. They were the only attorneys to address that conference and were invited back to the Vatican later that year for further consultations. They keynoted the conference in 2002.

Not only is Americans United for Life concerned with law, but also with culture. The group was a major co-sponsor of three academic symposia held earlier this year at Georgetown University, Boston College and St. John's University called “30 Years of Abortion and its Impact on Women.” These discussions explored what the true impact of abortion has been in the United States on the women who have endured it — depression, breast cancer, alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide.

Bordlee's address at St. John's highlighted the Pope's challenge for women “to promote a ‘new feminism’ that rejects the temptation of imitating models of ‘male domination’ in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation.” Bordlee focused on abortion-alternative policies that reflect this “new feminism,” including right-to-know laws, which give women full information on the medical risks of abortion, and federal funding of crisis-pregnancy centers and maternity homes, which provide social services. A book compiling essays by the speakers at the three college symposia is expected to be published this fall.

“We must realize that there is much that can be done socially, culturally and legally,” writes Bordlee in an essay posted on the group's Web site, “to reduce abortion and to make positive alternatives readily available.”

Tom Szyszkiewicz writes from Altura, Minnesota.