By DEXTER DUGGAN
Reporters see individuals they cover from up close as well as from the distance that everyone else observes them on daily news reports. Sometimes the two images are congruent, and sometimes not.
Longtime national pro-life leader Joe Scheidler seemed impressive from either perspective to me. I had a professional relationship with him, although I never was a coffee-break chum of his.
I’d heard about Scheidler doing daily pro-life news updates via a telephone recording in the 1970s, back before there were emails and social media.
They were a snappy dose of news that covered a spectrum of developments in short order. He barked them out like an excited radio announcer. I had a lot of those brief long-distance calls on the monthly phone bill back then as I sought information to pass along further in Arizona.
He, a lifelong Midwesterner, often wore a cowboy hat with street clothes, not rodeo togs. I, who spent most of my life in the Southwest, did not.
Scheidler was executive director at Illinois Right to Life when I first heard of him. Then in 1980 he created the Pro-Life Action League, where he spent most of his pro-life career, for greater freedom of taking direct action.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s scientifically ignorant, personally arrogant overnight invention of national permissive abortion in 1973 prompted Scheidler to leave his public-relations career for the pro-life world where experienced public outreach certainly was a plus.
The world was turned upside down by this depravity the High Court tossed off as casually as a cat that had no idea what it did when it accidentally knocked a gun onto the floor that fired and shot someone.
In his memoir that was released in December 2016, Scheidler wrote, “I felt like a foreigner in my own country. We had embarked on a program of destroying our posterity.”
Many other people shared Scheidler’s astonishment that these blind judges could force the U.S. into a jihad on babies with the notion they suddenly had discovered a previously unknown basic right. When a nation is governed by judges pulling rabbits out of a hat, bad results are guaranteed. When dominant media slaver in delight, even worse.
The New York Times’ obituary of Scheidler posted January 20 concluded by noting the pungent title of his memoir, Racketeer for Life.
I don’t recall how we first made contact; I may have gone up and talked to him at one of the early national pro-life conventions. However, I definitely was on the long-distance phone sometimes with Scheidler in Chicago when I covered the homicide trials of abortionist William Baxter Waddill, Jr., MD, in southern California in the late 1970s.
Scheidler’s phone newsline and personal contacts with journalists were a plus as I sought to pass the word along to resistant media, while I covered the trials mainly for The Wanderer, as well as for the National Catholic Register and some other outlets.
Then as now the abortion-loving dominant so-called news media were ashamed of publicizing grisly abortion facts. Why, if people widely knew the reality of what abortion involves, they wouldn’t love or at least tolerate it as the propaganda media decided they should.
It’s sort of as if, you know, a greedy, lowdown tavern owner wanted all his customers to go out to their cars staggering drunk every evening, but he never wanted the police to know where all those automobile fatalities came from.
Waddill was a busy abortionist and Ob/Gyn who was accused of strangling Baby Girl Weaver at about seven and a half months of gestation. She had emerged from a saline abortion as “a viable baby,” as a head nurse described her, and was rushed by nurses to the newborn nursery at Westminster, Calif., Community Hospital in March 1977.
Newborn nurseries are hardly the place where abortionists want their victims taken. So, when Waddill learned over the phone that the saline he infused hadn’t worked, he immediately cursed and forbade care for Baby Weaver although he failed to ask for any medical specifics on her condition, then he rushed back to the hospital to begin the evening that ended him up in Superior Court for about eight months total.
Each of the juries in two separate trials couldn’t come to a conclusion, so he neither was convicted nor acquitted when mistrials were declared.
The Waddills of the world at work make for the sort of soul-draining environment that Scheidler and other pro-lifers face but still keep fighting — extermination camps for babies that cheerleading dominant media jump up and down and wave their pompoms for, although they don’t want to describe the game being played to you.
Saline abortions frequently produced survivors — like Gianna Jessen, who was aborted in southern California at almost the same time on the calendar and age in gestation as Baby Weaver but at a different location – so salines fell into disfavor with the death industry. Not that a baby being alive either inside or outside the womb matters much to them, except the survivors can cause more legal and financial complications.
I recall Scheidler mailing me a photocopy of one opinion column in a major newspaper whose author Scheidler had forwarded my trial information to. That was rewarding, but if the case had involved a California doctor who tortured animals or beat his wife and children, the wire services already would have had that story all over the place, and it needn’t have been left up to Scheidler to pass along my news to individual writers.
Scheidler and I never worked side by side, and long periods went by when we weren’t in contact, but I kept up with his work.
He didn’t act supercilious, but he was self-assured to the point that he, according to Rey Flores’ remembrance in last week’s Wanderer, had laughed along in shared amusement with some pro-abortion counterdemonstrators.
We connected at least as often through California as Arizona. When National Right to Life held its annual convention in Anaheim in summer 1980, I recall standing outside the hall one evening chatting with Scheidler, well-dressed, like an account executive, as I looked up at his dominant height.
We probably talked a bit about former militant pro-abortion leader Bernard Nathanson, MD, who attended this pro-life conference after announcing his full conversion to our side of the movement. I walked over to Nathanson and introduced myself after having interviewed him on the phone earlier that year, with the unusual feeling that he no longer was on the other side of the abyss.
That Anaheim convention would be nearly 41 full years ago now, but even if someone had told Scheidler and me that we’d still be at this for nearly half a century more, we’d have sighed but said we’re in for however long was necessary. Human slavery wasn’t ended in a half-century in the U.S. but that didn’t make it acceptable.
Scheidler probably was disappointed that the crime hadn’t ended by the time he approached his last days, but, as they say, it’s not when you succeed but whether you fight. It was just too bad that those on the other side in their adamant ignorance kept the evils boiling so badly.
The obituary at his Pro-Life Action League website said: “Joe’s career as a pro-life activist took him to every state in U.S. and countries on four continents, as well as through countless court battles, including the notorious NOW v. Scheidler RICO case, the longest case in U.S. federal court history and the only one to make three trips to the U.S. Supreme Court, including 8-1 and 8-0 rulings in 2003 and 2006 that fully vindicated him.”
The last time we met up was in 2018 at the January Walk for Life West Coast in San Francisco. He received the Walk’s annual St. Gianna Molla Award for Pro-Life Heroism, then I interviewed him later in the afternoon.
He told me that when he first had read the Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing permissive abortion, he thought it was so poorly done that it couldn’t last long.
“I thought it had to fall soon,” I quoted him in The Wanderer. “‘I wouldn’t have even given it a year’ before reversal, he said, adding that the majority justices ‘knew they were doing something against this country’s very basis’ that recognizes the Creator endows the unalienable right to life….
“As for his longtime work as a pro-life leader, ‘I don’t want to go down in history. I just want to go to Heaven,’ Scheidler said,” my story said.
Mission accomplished for Scheidler, although his and our mission down here continues.
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