December Pro-Life Gala In Washington . . . To Honor Surprise Guest With Bernard Nathanson Award
By DEXTER DUGGAN
A December “Life Is Beautiful Gala” in Washington, D.C., will be another step in her mission by a woman who promised a repentant, dying abortion pioneer that she’d work to reverse the pro-abortion revolution that he came to regret.
A “very important” surprise guest is to be at the gala to receive an award, the woman said.
In 1969 Bernard Nathanson, MD, a man with a mission, co-founded NARAL, whose acronym originally meant the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. But by 1979, in his book Aborting America (Doubleday), Nathanson wrote of how he deeply had come to regret his advocacy for permissive abortion.
Although it took Nathanson just a decade to make a complete change, the results of his original advocacy have so dug themselves into American law, thanks to the adamantly ignorant U.S. Supreme Court, that nearly a half-century later permissive abortion still reigns.
Terry Beatley, a Virginia woman who informed herself into becoming an active pro-lifer, told The Wanderer in an October 22 interview that she’d been “begging God for direction…I knew I was supposed to try” to get an interview with Nathanson, then 83, who was dying of cancer in December 2009.
To her surprise, she succeeded. Instead of the palatial Manhattan residence she expected, Beatley found the suffering Nathanson in more of what seemed an efficiency apartment, she said.
The repentant abortionist asked her to reveal “the strategy of how I deceived America.” She promised she would. And his message? Beatley said he replied, “Tell America that the co-founder of NARAL says to: Love one another. Abortion is not love. Stop the killing. The world needs more love. I’m all about love now.”
He died just over a year later, in February 2011.
By the winter of 2012, Beatley said, she was asking God to release her from the promise she made to Nathanson, but God kept opening doors for her.
Beatley later wrote, What If We’ve Been Wrong? Keeping My Promise to America’s “Abortion King,” published in 2016 by Guiding Light Books.
The gala is scheduled for Sunday, December 8, at the Andrew Mellon Building in the nation’s capital, with cocktails at 5:30 p.m. and dinner and the program beginning at 6:30 p.m.
More information is at the website of the Hosea Initiative (hosea4you.org), of which Beatley is president. The site references Hosea 4:6 in the Bible, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”
The March For Life
Spreading knowledge about the abortion industry and the pro-life cause are Beatley’s goals.
The surprise guest at the gala “is a very important person who has unashamedly raised up his voice” on behalf of the unborn and will receive the first Bernard N. Nathanson “Courageous Witness for Life” award, Beatley told The Wanderer.
Beatley said her involvement in the pro-life movement began after a Catholic homeschooling friend asked her to attend the national March for Life, in Washington, D.C., where she “was shocked at the hundreds of thousands of people and the energy” there.
Educating herself with the contacts she made, Beatley said, “My hair went on fire” when she discovered how Planned Parenthood and kindred interests oppose parental rights, and she successfully exerted herself to help defeat a powerful Virginia state Democratic politician who served these interests.
She also learned about the documentary Maafa 21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America, which traces the eugenics campaign against blacks into current times. She got “a headful of information” and found interracial cooperation in spreading this knowledge, she said.
Beatley said that when she showed the documentary to one black pastor, he said he’d never vote for a Democrat serving this philosophy again. “You see what happens when you love people with the truth,” she said.
The week before The Wanderer interviewed Beatley, she had visited the Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas to make educational presentations, training 3,000 Catholic teenagers, she said, as well as joining in an interview with Archbishop Joseph Naumann there.
Currently Beatley is involved in plans for a Nathanson movie, she said.
Earlier in her life, she said, she received a degree in marketing from Virginia Tech and worked in investment planning for 13 years.
