After Nearly Half A Century… The Pro-Life Cause Gets ‘Tremendously Important” Recognition
By DEXTER DUGGAN
This was a day that early leaders of the pro-life movement never lived to see while on the face of this Earth, although they may have read the news in The Celestial Chronicle while romping on the clouds.
The president of the United States actually came out, stood in solidarity with, and spoke directly to hundreds of thousands of pro-lifers massed for the annual March for Life in January 2020 in Washington, D.C.
Other presidents, all Republicans, who had proclaimed their pro-life sympathies had never managed to do what Donald Trump accomplished by appearing before a delighted horde. Instead, at best, they stayed in the White House and spoke over a remote connection, as if pro-lifers were some sort of untouchables.
All the Democratic presidents who served since the U.S. Supreme Court invented its magical, unconstitutional right to permissive abortion in 1973 wouldn’t show pro-life support.
By 2020, legions of other pro-lifers already had gone to their reward. Those at the first D.C. March for Life in 1974 would be 46 years older now. A 30-year-old would be 76, a 50-year-old would be 96.
But hordes of today’s young pro-lifers not only weren’t born in 1974, maybe their parents hadn’t even been born yet, back when Republican Richard Nixon was in the waning days of his presidency.
The sheer outrageous falsehoods and pretensions of the Supreme Court — and the delighted approval of these baby-killing fantasies by lying dominant media and the establishment — served to motivate lasting rejection of the court’s aberration by everyone educated on the issue. Pro-life marches never will go away but only persist in their determination until the evil is undone.
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on January 28: “It is great for the pro-life movement that Trump appeared in person because it becomes the new standard for all future pro-life presidents. They don’t have to appear every year, but they will have to appear at least once or twice in each term.”
Querard added, “The real long-term gain for the movement may be all of the Trump voters who support him because of economic issues, but who do not spend much time considering the issue of life versus abortion. Because of who the messenger was, they may have heard a pro-life argument for the first time, and I’m hopeful that it will open and change some hearts and minds across the country.”
The Wanderer asked national conservative commentator Quin Hillyer about another pundit’s speculation on what really may be in Trump’s heart.
Hillyer, who has criticized Trump, replied on January 27: “Setting aside all questions of what anyone believes may be in Trump’s heart, pro-lifers should be extremely grateful that he spoke in person to the March for Life.
“The imprimatur of the Oval Office, and the notion that the cause is one worthy not just of nominal support but active and proud participation, is tremendously important. More than that, it is a blessing,” Hillyer added.
With a number of other speakers also on the January 24 March for Life’s program, Trump couldn’t deliver one of his customary extended talks. But in 13 minutes the president reviewed his administration’s accomplishments and those of pro-lifers while pointing out the attacks on innocent life and religious liberty by Democrats and the “far left.”
An estimated half-million people reportedly gathered for the event in the nation’s capital.
Drawing toward his conclusion, Trump said, “We cannot know what our citizens yet unborn will achieve, the dreams they will imagine, the masterpieces they will create, the discoveries they will make. But we know this: Every life brings love into this world. Every child brings joy to a family. Every person is worth protecting.
“And above all,” Trump added, “we know that every human soul is divine, and every human life — born and unborn — is made in the holy image of Almighty God.”
The PBS NewsHour reported on January 24, “Thousands descended on Washington, D.C., from across the country to march against abortion. The annual rally draws massive crowds, but Trump’s decision to break from precedent and attend the event injected extra energy into this year’s march.
“Historically, anti-abortion presidents including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have avoided the March for Life gatherings, perhaps out of concern over inciting political pushback from pro-choice advocates. This year, Trump chose to jump into the fray,” the NewsHour report added.
A conservative Washington Post columnist, former White House aide, and Fox News contributor, Marc Thiessen, told Fox News’ The Story program on January 23 that it was “hard to overstate how important this decision is by the president” to come forth to speak, after Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush had not, even though they were urged to.
“It was so strange,” Thiessen continued, “you’re calling in to a rally that you can see (from) your Oval Office window, practically, and it sent a message to pro-life conservatives and pro-life Republicans that they are really the black sheep of the Republican Party.
“That they are needed because of their votes, they are tolerated, but the prevailing attitude was, ‘There are those people talking about abortion again, making people uncomfortable.’ That was the establishment view,” he said.
On the Fox program Thiessen credited Trump for embracing “pro-life conservatives” instead of just “tolerating them for their votes,” observing: “The great thing about Donald Trump is that Donald Trump doesn’t care about what the establishment thinks.”
Cardinal Burke
Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, interviewed on the same Fox program, said, “I think it’s wonderful news” that Trump would speak at the March. “There couldn’t be anything more important for our nation than to restore the respect for human life. And that the president himself will now give witness to this is really, it’s a wonderful moment.”
The program’s Martha MacCallum asked about a liberal Catholic writer’s criticism that pro-lifers were lashing themselves to Trump to their own detriment.
Burke replied: “That the president happens to agree that procured abortion is an attack on innocent, defenseless human life,” and that he agrees with pro-lifers’ work, is “not a political issue, it’s a question of agreeing about a fundamental truth. The fact that I can praise the president for this doesn’t mean that I praise him for everything else that he says and does.”
Tearing off the limbs or grinding up the bodies of tens of millions defenseless preborn babies or sucking out their brains or poisoning them with fatal injections or cutting out their organs for illegal profits — how could anyone in his right mind say this is acceptable, with no modification at all?
When one would think the moral imperative is more than clear on rejecting this monstrosity, many top Republicans had dashed for cover as if fearful of associating themselves with honorable pro-lifers calling for its end.
Yet leftist Democrats, even those who dare claim to be practicing Catholics, publicly strut around insisting on promoting unlimited abortion, including Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.
Members of the “Created Equal” pro-life organization that displays pictures of pitiful aborted babies turned up at a recent 2020 “Women’s March” and asked, “Why are you hiding something you support?” when pro-abortion ralliers tried to cover up the pro-lifers’ disturbing but factual pictures.
And just watch some media trumpet like CNN’s slogan-spouting leftist Chris Cuomo shackle his mind shut with hoary clichés like “reproductive rights” instead of acknowledging the slaughterhouse realities.
Ellen McCormack
Among the now-departed pro-life pioneers was New Yorker Ellen McCormack, who died in 2011 at age 84. She was a traditional Democratic voter who became vocally pro-life when it became plain how early pro-abortionists intended to rip apart American law to win their radical, chilling goals.
McCormack stepped up her game and provided valuable inspiration for pro-lifers when she went from producing a pro-life column, Who Speaks for the Unborn Child?, to becoming an actual Democratic candidate for the U.S presidency in 1976. She was the first woman presidential candidate to qualify for federal matching funds and receive Secret Service protection.
Her vibrant candidacy sent shock waves through the establishment. The nationally unknown McCormack won almost as many votes in Boston during the 1976 Massachusetts primary election as the nationally known presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh (D., Ind.), who proceeded to drop out of the race.
Yet rather than accommodate pro-lifers, highly ideologized Democrat leaders tried to bury their views or purge them from the party — thus persuading many traditional Democrats to become Republicans.
It was bad enough that pro-lifers had to fight off attacks from the establishment, leftists, and dominant media. But they absorbed attacks from some putative allies, too.
Pro-lifers have gladly welcomed converts to their ranks, even including former abortion workers and leaders like Bernard Nathanson, MD, and Abby Johnson — and Donald Trump as well, who in the past said he supported abortion, but ran for president in 2016 as a converted pro-lifer and drew the support of experienced New York pro-life pioneer Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life.
But Missouri historian James Hitchcock produced a book in 2016, after Trump was chosen as the GOP nominee but before Election Day, condemning “the bizarre threat posed by Donald Trump, who combined rock-bottom populist appeal with a rage-driven egotism largely devoid of substance and whose record showed that he was far from being pro-life.”
Hitchcock forecast that Democrat Hillary Clinton almost certainly would defeat Trump, but if Trump somehow were to win, “he appeared to lack both the knowledge and the will to address pro-life concerns. It was a tragic ending indeed to the long and courageous pro-life struggle.”
The book was titled Abortion, Religious Freedom, and Catholic Politics.
In the book, Hitchcock attacked me as a writer for The Wanderer with falsehoods and misattributed statements, but neither he nor his publisher, Taylor & Francis, has made any apology, explanation, or correction after more than two and a half years of my calling him out.
He also attacked The Wanderer as not giving high importance to the pro-life issue. It’d be fair to say that President Trump has done far more to defend and advance the pro-life cause than the obdurate Hitchcock.
