By DEXTER DUGGAN
SAN FRANCISCO — As an African pro-life leader saluted U.S. pro-lifers and urged them to continue their fight for babies and moms around the world, two American pro-life strategists told The Wanderer of plans to help keep abortion giant Planned Parenthood in disarray.
This was part of the scene January 23 at the nation’s second-largest annual pro-life gathering, the Walk for Life West Coast, which assembles on the broad plaza in front of San Francisco City Hall for speeches, then marches curb-to-curb on major thoroughfare Market Street through downtown.
Before the 12:30 p.m. rally, Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone celebrated a packed 9:30 a.m. Mass at St. Mary of the Assumption Cathedral, which looks down from a hilltop onto City Hall. He commented in his homily about Catholics who unworthily receive the Eucharist.
Cordileone didn’t mention names. However, local Democratic Cong. Nancy Pelosi has become renowned for energetically promoting the Culture of Death while claiming to be a faithfully practicing Catholic and receiving Communion.
At the rally, Nigerian-born speaker Obianuju Ekeocha, looking out over tens of thousands of participants, exclaimed, “I am so excited by the crowd I see here today!. . . I bring you greetings from the pro-life movement throughout the continent of Africa….You are such an example for every pro-life person in the world.”
The founder and president of Culture of Life Africa (cultureof
lifeafrica.com), Ekeocha said pro-lifers speak truth to power. She added: “I tell you as a woman, we should never have to buy success with the blood of our babies. . . . Authentic development should not be paid with the blood of the innocent.”
Congratulating “the great pro-life movement you are in America,” Ekeocha said the right to life of unborn babies must extend from San Francisco to California to the United States and the world.
A few weeks before she arrived for this rally, Ekeocha gave an email interview to The Wanderer that criticized U.S. government attempts to impose a Culture of Death on Africa. (See p. 1 of the January 14, 2016 hardcopy edition, “African pro-lifer to warn S.F. rally of Obama’s ‘path of destruction’ for her continent.”)
Speaking with The Wanderer just before he addressed the January 23 rally, David Daleiden, leader of the California-based Center for Medical Progress (CMP), said production work is continuing on more video material that exposes the abortion industry.
CMP’s videos that began to be released last summer shocked millions of people around the nation over abortionists’ barbarity and greed — although abortion-loving dominant media reacted with a fury of evasion and denial of the video facts.
Daleiden told The Wanderer that “we will have a lot more content coming out in the near future.”
People’s access to information through their personal electronic devices, beyond the control of pro-abortion editors, means “a whole democratization of information that can’t be covered up,” he said.
Planned Parenthood is “on the ropes all across the country” because of the video revelations, Daleiden said, but PP fears another shoe still is going to drop against it.
PP hired private investigators against himself and a few of his colleagues, Daleiden said, but the one assigned against him was so unskilled that she was caught “right outside my door. She was trespassing, so she’s not a very good PI.”
Daleiden said he lives in California’s Orange County, where CMP is based, but he declined to be more specific for the record about the location.
Two days after speaking with The Wanderer, Daleiden as well as an associate were indicted on contrived charges by the Harris County, Texas, grand jury, even though the jury cleared Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast of any wrongdoing.
Charged with an offense of offering to purchase human fetal tissue, Daleiden noted in a January 25 news release that “buying fetal tissue requires a seller as well. Planned Parenthood still cannot deny the admissions from their leadership about fetal organ sales captured on video for all the world to see.”
Daleiden never intended actually to make the purchase, but PP executives in the videos repeatedly spoke of being paid for providing baby organs.
The editors of National Review noted in a January 26 post titled, “In Houston, a dubious indictment,” that Texas has a reputation as “the American capital of politically motivated prosecutions.”
Libertarian-inclined legal expert Andrew Napolitano said on Fox News that “a political prosecutor” had overstepped herself. “Absolutely this is a political hit job,” Napolitano said.
Another leading pro-life activist who spoke with The Wanderer during the San Francisco rally was Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life (priestsforlife.org), who said a training program is to begin in February for pro-lifers to take jobs in the abortion industry.
This way PP won’t know for sure who’s working for it, both as volunteers and paid employees, Pavone said. “We want to sow the seeds of distrust within the abortion industry.”
Asked how these pro-lifers would avoid doing actual abortion work, he replied, “We’re going to have to see how it develops.”
Pavone said he announced the project a few days earlier, outside a PP facility under construction in Washington, D.C.
Some of the information learned within abortuary walls can be revealed publicly, he said, but other items can be turned over to government prosecutors privately, to assist in their investigations.
“A number of prosecutors are doing this (conducting unreported investigations) right now across the country,” Pavone said.
Daleiden told the rally crowd that the CMP videos “are tapping into something very deep in our country. . . . The response we’re seeing all across the country . . . should give us a lot of hope.”
In his morning homily at St. Mary of the Assumption Cathedral, Cordileone warned against “allowing ourselves to be subject to the influences all around us that promote the Culture of Death.”
The archbishop’s prepared text was titled: “God’s mercy in the Eucharist leads us from the darkness of death to the light of life.”
“Our worship of God is the heart of the matter: if we have any hope of rightly ordering our society, then our worship of God must be rightly ordered, and worthily centered around the Eucharist,” Cordileone said.
“Far from a simple gesture of welcome, the Eucharist is Christ’s one perfect sacrifice made present to us, such that no one should dare approach except ‘with the fear of God, faith and love’. . . . The heart of the matter is right here: in how we approach Holy Communion and behave in our act of worship, in doing everything possible to ensure that we receive worthily,” he preached.
“If we do not understand this, and instead assume a casual attitude toward the most solemn mystery of God’s life in our midst, how can we possibly expect to instill a sense of respect for the human life around us? As St. Paul says, ‘Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily…eats and drinks judgment on himself’,” the archbishop said.
At the rally, Cordileone imparted an apostolic blessing from Pope Francis, who “sends warm greetings and his assurance of his closeness in prayer to all taking part in the annual Walk for Life West Coast.”
The Wanderer personally encountered Cordileone later, as pro-lifers were moving from the rally to walk down Market Street.
Asked if he had anyone certain in mind when he preached about unworthily receiving the Eucharist, Cordileone replied, “It has a broad application,” adding that he noticed a decline in understanding about proper reception of this sacrament.
The Slave Market
Nigerian-born pro-life leader Ekeocha told the rally that her Culture of Life Africa organization tracks what’s happening with the push to legalize abortion around the continent. “We don’t want it!”
The pro-abortion governments of wealthier, bigger nations are saying African countries have to legalize abortion, and they want to punish countries that don’t comply, Ekeocha said.
A longtime speaker at the event, New Jersey Baptist Pastor Clenard Childress Jr., denounced abortion as “the horror that is going on every day in America.”
Childress is founder of BlackGenocide.org, which calls attention to how African-American babies are targeted for abortion.
Saying the NAACP doesn’t want to hear about the abortion issue, Childress exclaimed, “If you ignore it, we’ve got to get in your faces with it.”
Recalling the biblical teaching that a person who succors the hungry and thirsty is succoring Christ Himself, Childress said Christ also is an unborn baby being aborted. “You’re doing it to Me!”
“The slave market is still alive when . . . you’re selling body parts,” the pastor said.
Latino music icon Jesus Emmanuel Arturo Acha Martinez — popularly called Emmanuel — warned the rally, “There’s a movement throughout the entire world to destroy the family….But there’s a greater movement, the movement of God.”
Emmanuel said he felt more comfortable speaking in Spanish, but his daughter would translate for him.
Pro-life marches show support for pro-life by millions of Americans and millions of Latino people, he said.
God “will give us hands to embrace all the women who suffer” in the abortion culture, he said.
In recent years, the 12-year-old San Francisco rally and walk has been estimated at 50,000 people or more, while pro-abortion protesters, never a significantly large number, had dwindled to a couple of hundred or so people grouped along Market Street.
Sarah Saccone, who runs an adoption home near San Diego, came north for the San Francisco rally.
Saccone told The Wanderer that the abortion advocates’ familiar black and orange posters for “Abortion on demand and without apology” show “it always seems they’re carrying so much pain,” screaming and holding coat hangers.
They could be reacting with fear this year, she said, “when Planned Parenthood is under fire as it is.”
The Wanderer asked a Walk media representative for a crowd estimate this year and received this reply:
“Organizers would not give a firm number of attendees, saying only ‘tens of thousands,’ but crowd size was consistent with recent years, where local mainstream media estimated 50,000 to 55,000 people.”
A Step Back
This year northern California’s largest daily paper, the broadsheet San Francisco Chronicle, gave the top half of the third page of its “Bay Area” section to the rally and walk, under the headline, “Thousands rally against abortion,” accompanied by one large color photo of more than 20 people’s heads on the Market Street walk.
This was a step back from last year’s surprising coverage, which was the top story on the Bay Area section’s front page and had four color photos including a sweeping crowd shot.
Both years’ stories, however, failed to quote any of the rally speakers but instead ran comments by people on the street on both sides of the issue.
Still, the Chronicle didn’t bury the story or try to make each side of the turnout seem about equal in size, as it did previously.
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