By DEXTER DUGGAN
SAN FRANCISCO — Shortly after pro-life students convened here for talks about pro-life momentum in society, pop singer Joy Villa appeared on the red carpet for the Grammys music awards in New York wearing a white gown with a large colorful painting of her own preborn daughter as a sonogram image on her flowing skirt.
The two January 28 occurrences were coincidental but synergistic.
Students for Life of America (SFLA) holds East and West Coast conferences each January just after the major pro-life marches on those coasts, in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. This year’s theme was “Momentum 2018.”
As the conference here began, SFLA President Kristan Hawkins said that even in San Francisco, where Planned Parenthood is building a new “mega-abortion” center, “We have the momentum. We’re winning. Change is coming to America.”
Later that day in New York, Villa with her pro-life gown and “Choose Life” handbag hit the red carpet and proclaimed, “I believe in loving the child and the mother.”
Hawkins told the California gathering, “All of (Planned Parenthood’s) services are down” except for abortion, which is up.
PP bragged “that they trained 700 students last year….We trained 11,000 students last year….I was embarrassed for Planned Parenthood,” Hawkins said.
The event here began with 8 a.m. registration followed by speakers’ sessions and workshops. It continued toward the evening with information tables staffed by the spectrum of pro-life viewpoints, from the Secular ProLife organization to pro-life feminists and pregnancy-aid groups to Catholic nuns.
Outside was a beautiful blue-sky day, as it also had been the previous day for the Walk for Life West Coast through San Francisco’s downtown on Market Street. But the educational presentations had to be indoors, in conference rooms at St. Mary of the Assumption Catholic Cathedral.
One improvement this year was having the information tables set up behind audience seating in the main room, rather than down both sides of two hallways — which sometimes became congested in previous years as clusters of people surrounding the tables impeded passage for others down the center of the hallways.
About 370 students attended the California conference, Hawkins told The Wanderer, while about 1,900 attended the January 20 East Coast conference after the larger annual March for Life there.
“In Washington, D.C., there’s a lot of momentum created last year,” with the new Trump administration, she told the conference here, and now PP is being investigated for federal crimes.
“You can’t walk five feet at the Department of Health and Human Services without running into a pro-lifer. . . . We are one vote away from having a majority on the Supreme Court,” she said.
“. . . Our message is being heard loud and clear” across the nation, Hawkins said, “including in the Oval Office.”
Not only is it being heard at the White House, one could add, but it’s being spoken publicly there, too, notably during President Trump’s January 19 statement in the Rose Garden while surrounded by young pro-lifers.
Hawkins stressed the need to defund Planned Parenthood.
“Defunding Planned Parenthood, we can’t stop talking” about that, she said, because PP routinely challenges new pro-life laws through injunctions, and it brags that it spent $38 million on politics in the 2016 election cycle.
“You have to be relentless, you have to be unceasing. . . . You have to have an attitude, stubborn,” in this effort, Hawkins said.
She told of an SFLA project that displayed piles of hundreds of thousands of pairs of baby socks, to make the graphic point that each pair “should be filled with baby feet,” but they weren’t because Planned Parenthood aborted those babies.
The project aimed to persuade Congress to cut off taxpayer funding of PP.
A report posted at The Blaze website last year said: “‘I was changing kids’ minds on the street,’ Hawkins said. ‘People were just walking by, and I would say, “Every sock represents one baby Planned Parenthood aborts,” and people’s mouths were dropping. . . . One kid came back and said, “Can you say that again?” So it’s a huge reminder that these are babies, and that’s not even all of them’.”
Hawkins warned the San Francisco conference against being diverted into other issues, worthy as some of them may be. “We have to stay on mission,” she said, adding later, “We’ve got to stay united.”
Shortly thereafter, during a panel presentation, Hawkins said, “The majority of people do not know what happens in abortion” as babies are torn apart. If they understood, she said, they wouldn’t say they don’t want to oppose someone else deciding to have an abortion.
“It’s a violent act, it’s innately a violent act,” Hawkins said. “. . . Be joyful, be excited, be passionate” when pursuing pro-life goals in a society where everyone has been affected by abortion in some way.
David Bereit, former head of the widespread 40 Days for Life pro-life campaign of prayer, fasting, and witness, told the conference that until the abortion industry is stopped, abortion won’t be stopped.
When the abortion industry is deprived of “customer dollars,” there’s an impact, he said, because one-third of PP’s money comes from customers, while tax funding is one-third and corporate donors give one-third.
The idea for 40 Days for Life hadn’t even begun when the 21st century arrived, but now it’s in 770 cities.
“Yes, you can make a difference. You can impact the abortion industry,” Bereit said to cheers and applause.
At a presentation later during the day, Bereit told of a difference that a Florida pharmacist’s little girl made one day at an abortuary. After a woman appeared determined to ignore pro-lifers and enter the clinic door, the little girl began singing Jesus Loves the Little Children.
The woman stopped, had tears streaming down her face, came over and hugged the girl, and didn’t have the abortion, Bereit said.
“You can make a lifesaving difference,” Bereit said, and also love abortion workers away from those jobs.
National pro-life activist Rev. Patrick Mahoney told the conference this was the first time he’d come west for the San Francisco walk, featuring “tens of thousands of young people” marching through a liberal citadel.
Although he loves the March for Life in the nation’s capital, he said, “I love the diversity out here,” with numbers of Asian, black, and Hispanic pro-lifers marching through downtown San Francisco.
Mahoney told the conference that pro-life groups have to develop “rapid response teams” to reply immediately to breaking news events and help shape them rather than wait for pro-abortionists and the media to define the scenario.
“You cannot be defined by your opposition. You have to define yourself,” Mahoney said.
In Houston, when the pro-life Center for Medical Progress led by David Daleiden was under fire from the District Attorney’s office, “We framed the issue,” Mahoney said. “We were not defined” by a D.A. sympathetic to Planned Parenthood.
The Wanderer asked Hawkins why she thought PP President Cecile Richards had just announced her resignation. Was it possible she was going to convert to being a pro-lifer? Although miracles are possible, Hawkins replied, she thought the Department of Justice investigation into alleged PP criminal activity was the reason, and that Richards couldn’t take the heat.
Judicial Nominations
Kelsey Hazzard, founder of Secular ProLife in 2009, was at her organization’s information table when The Wanderer went over to renew acquaintances. She said Secular ProLife has more than 20,000 Facebook followers.
Hazzard said she was concerned that a few hundred pro-abortionists behind a police line at the previous day’s Walk for Life West Coast down Market Street were chanting, “Walk for Life, that’s a lie. You don’t care if women die.”
She said she wished she could have crossed the police line to tell them, “Legal abortion is killing women. They don’t know who Tonya Reaves is. They don’t know who Jennifer Morbelli is” — names of some of the women dead at the hands of legal abortionists.
Asked by The Wanderer how she thinks Donald Trump has been doing as a pro-life president, Hazzard replied, “I think Trump’s a mixed bag. It’s no secret I find him personally distasteful for a number of reasons. But he’s been nominating good judicial people. I think that counts for a lot.”
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