The abortion lobby will be quick to claim that the American people wrote a blank check last night for on-demand abortion.

That’s just not so.

While the Democratic Party won the White House as well as decisive control over both houses of Congress, exit polls found that economic issues were overwhelmingly the most important motivators for voters yesterday.

And when voters are worried about their pocketbooks as they are right now due to the global financial crisis, the party of the incumbent president is almost always punished.

Obviously, with the Democrats so dominant and President-elect Barack Obama so committed to the expansion of abortion rights, the next four years are going to be extraordinarily challenging for the pro-life community. But Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, says that’s no reason to lose hope.

“The American people do not share Barack Obama’s extreme and offensive views on abortion,” Father Pavone said in a Nov. 4 statement, entitled “A Grave Mistake and an Abiding Hope.” “They never have and they never will.”

Added Father Pavone, “The vast majority of Americans are pro-life. They will fight abortion on the local level, opening pregnancy centers and closing abortion mills, activating their Churches and educating their children, proclaiming the message in the media and demonstrating in the streets. The pro-life movement is winning this battle in the hearts and minds of the American people, as opinion polls show and as the shrinking number of abortion mills and abortion providers prove.

“Political races are always a swinging of the pendulum. As soon as you win, you begin to lose, and as soon as you lose, you begin the ascent again to winning. In the next two election cycles (2010 and 2012) the pro-life movement will make up for political ground lost in this one.”

Concluded Father Pavone, “It is all right to be disappointed at the end of an election season, but one must never walk away. Amidst disappointment is abiding hope in America, where everything remains possible, and where a new chapter of the pro-life movement has just begun. The efforts that were made, and the sacrifices endured in this election season made a difference, and we will build on that difference to see another day when the work and the ballots of pro-life people will dismantle the Culture of Death. We will keep marching toward that pro-life America we seek, and won’t stop until we get there.”

— Tom McFeely