By DEXTER DUGGAN
SAN FRANCISCO — A veteran speaker at the Walk for Life West Coast here told tens of thousands of pro-lifers rallying under a bright blue sky that they’ll see the end of permissive abortion.
“Pro-life, don’t get weary now,” Rev. Clenard Childress Jr. urged the crowd covering the expansive Civic Center Plaza in front of San Francisco City Hall on January 27. “It’s going to be over….The walls of abortion are coming down on your watch.”
Childress’ tone has matched the political setting of the moment, from defiance when pro-abortion radical Barack Obama was president to hope and gratitude with Donald Trump in the White House.
“We’re winning…and it’s soon going to be over,” said Childress, a New Jersey pastor who established the website blackgenocide.org to educate the public about the racist aims of eugenicists like Margaret Sanger and the Planned Parenthood organization she founded.
Other rally speakers were a former abortionist who became a strong pro-lifer, a persevering first-generation national pro-life activist whose advice is to pray and work, and a woman who was commissioned by repentant “abortion king” Dr. Bernard Nathanson to carry forward the message of his candid confession that he deceived the nation.
The Walk for Life West Coast is the nation’s second-largest annual pro-life march in January, behind the March for Life in Washington, D.C., to mourn the U.S. Supreme Court’s shocking January 22, 1973, imposition of massive permissive abortion.
Hundreds of other pro-life marches also occur nationally, including in Los Angeles and San Diego.
The locally dominant San Francisco Chronicle, no friend of the pro-life movement, headlined on its website (sfgate) that the Walk “brings huge crowd to SF streets” on January 27. The story began by reporting “tens of thousands” in attendance.
As has become tradition, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco was principal celebrant of a packed 9:30 a.m. Walk for Life Mass at St. Mary of the Assumption Cathedral, atop Cathedral Hill, looking down on City Hall a few blocks away. The plaza rally began at 12:30 p.m.
When the rally ended at 1:40 p.m., pro-lifers proceeded to nearby Market Street, where they marched down this thoroughfare to the Ferry Building on San Francisco Bay. The Chronicle said the event closed busy Market Street for six hours — which included time to prepare for the walk to begin.
In his homily, Cordileone said rejection of God’s plan of life leads to “death and mourning.”
Through God’s creative action, the archbishop said, order emerged from chaos, but with the fall of humanity’s first parents, chaos returned. “But God does not abandon us. He does not remain far off.”
The present age “tells us we can compartmentalize, even with the truth: take what you like, leave what you don’t. But it doesn’t work that way, not if you want to live by God’s order…which in turn orients us to life,” Cordileone said.
Affirming “the dignity of the human life in the womb is to affirm every other single aspect of this order. To set aside any one aspect unravels the entire order, bringing back chaos and all that goes with it — death and mourning, wailing and pain,” he said.
To follow Christ’s words means that people will receive His promise of having life, and having it more abundantly, on Earth, and finding “perfect happiness with Him forever in the life of Heaven,” Cordileone said.
One of the petitions voiced at the Mass was not only for the end of legal abortion but also for the conversion of those who hold the pro-abortion view.
Although this Mass is the largest religious observance in conjunction with the Walk, others including Anglicans, Lutherans, Baptists, Orthodox and other Christians, non-Christians and secularists also participate. The invocation at the rally was by Archbishop Benjamin of San Francisco and the West of the Orthodox Church of America.
Childress, the New Jersey pastor and speaker, also commended Donald Trump, saying, “I thank God for a pro-life president…but most of all I thank God for you,” the audience, as providing the solution for legalized abortion.
Pro-lifers long “have been fighting fake news” about themselves, Childress said, adding later: “You can resist an invading army, but you can’t resist an idea whose time has come.”
He also lauded Trump for his tax-reform package that, he said, with one stroke of the pen did more for African-Americans than the last administration did in its entire eight years.
Although the rally wasn’t about various political issues, Childress said the tax-cut package gave the biggest break to single mothers with children, and doubled the child tax credit.
Illinoisan Joseph Scheidler, who helped pioneer pro-life activism outside abortuaries beginning in the 1970s, received the Walk’s annual St. Gianna Molla Award for Pro-Life Heroism.
(The Wanderer reviewed Scheidler’s book Racketeer for Life: Fighting the Culture of Death from the Sidewalk to the Supreme Court, in its January 12, 2017, hardcopy issue.
(That book review noted: “Like many other Americans, the photos did it for Scheidler. Seeing a photo of dead aborted babies for the first time rocked his world in the fall of 1972, while a coterie of activists for permissive abortion was trying to impose its will on the U.S.”)
Scheidler reminded the rally that long before the birth of Christ, the pagan Hippocratic Oath of medical ethics rejected abortion.
As for pro-lifers’ current task, “We have to do it in the old Benedictine way, ora and labora,” he said.
“. . . You have to be close to God, and then you work.”
Terry Beatley told the rally that her interview with former abortion activist Nathanson led her to found the Hosea Initiative (hosea4you.org) to teach the nation how his deceptive strategy successfully pushed for the legalization of permissive abortion.
“The vast majority of Americans do not know who Dr. Bernard Nathanson is” today, Beatley said, although he was known as “the abortion king” and the “public face of abortion” as he thrust phony claims on the nation to achieve his goal.
“He’s not just another abortionist. He’s the father of the abortion industry,” she said.
Nathanson, an atheist, shocked his associates and became a pro-lifer after the development of ultrasound technology revealed the humanity of the preborn baby. He later became a Catholic before dying of cancer.
The cover page of the Hosea Initiative website shows Nathanson’s face along with his admonition, “Continue teaching the strategy of how I deceived America.”
Beatley told the rally Nathanson wrote that the abortion movement is fatally flawed because of the way abortion was legalized.
Anger And Nightmares
Former abortionist Dr. John Bruchalski told the rally his conversion occurred “because of people like you praying for people like me. Prayer works.”
Bruchalski said he also was influenced by scientific literature, and women letting him know that abortion wasn’t the answer.
He began his remarks by saying, “Abortion hurts women, period. Abortion also hurts providers who provide that service, like me.”
Abortion held out the promise of “health, freedom, liberation,” he said, but “It was a lie.” His patients who received abortions became angrier and angrier, and his own heart grew harder, Bruchalski said, even though he had hoped to help women. Abortion means not “peace and sweet dreams,” but “anger and nightmares,” he said.
He later founded the Tepeyac pro-life medical center in Virginia.
60 Million Deaths
After the rally, Scheidler sat down for an interview with The Wanderer in an open-sided tent that served as a rudimentary medical station for possible emergencies during the gathering.
When he heard that Illinois was considering relaxing its abortion law in 1972, Scheidler said, “I never dreamed the Supreme Court would make abortion legal” nationwide. Then, when he read the 1973 ruling, he considered it so poorly done that he thought it couldn’t last long.
“I thought it had to fall soon. 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.
“The whole thing is flawed” and unconstitutional, but has resulted in 60 million deaths, Scheidler said. “You have to fight it day and night. This is something you never give up on.”
With the addition of “the right justice up there” on the High Court, “it will fall. . . . Maybe sooner than you think. And that would be a wonderful thing, for our Constitution to be straightened out,” Scheidler said. “. . . We’re a living lie in this country. The Founding Fathers couldn’t believe it.”
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.
As the Walk proceeded down Market Street past Mason and Turk Streets, a few hundred noisy pro-abortionists with red flags, bullhorns, and drums were held back from the pro-lifers by a firm police line.
They chanted “My body, my choice” while waving familiar orange and black signs demanding “Free abortion on demand without apology.”
Up over their heads, however, the Walk’s poster message that “Abortion Hurts Women” hung on San Francisco lampposts with official approval for all to see.
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