11-13-2008

By Judy Zabik

It’s time for new leadership in the pro-life movement and, thankfully, that leadership is now beginning to rise up all across America. This is happening under the banner of the Personhood Movement, which recognizes the personhood of all unborn children and the fact that they are therefore protected by the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment.

For more than three decades, the existing leadership of the pro-life movement has pursued a strategy of regulating abortion rather than ending it. Instead of insisting on our nation’s most important founding principle of the protection of the unalienable God-given right to life for all, by forgetting this timeless principle upon which our liberty is premised, they have thereby ceded the moral, political, and legal battle to the enablers of the abortion industry.

This failed strategy is now putting our posterity further into danger’s path.  President-elect Obama has promised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which will, in effect, nullify any incremental pro-life law or regulation that has been passed over the last 35 years.  While National Right to Life and their compromised allies will never acknowledge it, this would leave these “conventional” pro-life organizations no alternative but to embrace Human Life Amendments.  Unfortunately, NRLC has consistently worked to undermine these efforts in every state where one has been introduced.

Right to Life of Michigan is one of the largest and most highly esteemed conventional pro-life organizations in the nation.  And yet, they opposed Michigan’s Human Life Amendment in 2006.  From the Grand Rapids Press, March, 2006:

“Rather than try to directly ban abortion, Right to Life of Michigan wants to put its resources into electing a U.S. senator and governor who oppose abortion,” said Paul Miller, chairman of the group's PAC.  

Predictably, since then, they have lost all of it: the Human Life Amendment, one race for Governor and two for the U.S. Senate.  In fact, one of these U.S. Senate candidates lost his RLM pro-life endorsement precisely because he supported the Human Life Amendment petition drive.

Let’s fast forward to today.  In Michigan, RLM prides itself on being an 800-pound political gorilla.  How did this political powerhouse fare in the 2008 election?  Let’s take a look:

  1.    They lost 17 State Representative seats.
  2.    They lost 12 Circuit or District Court judges.
  3.    They lost one position on the Wayne State Board of Regents.
  4.    They lost the University of Michigan Board of Regents.
  5.    They lost one position on the Michigan State University Board of Trustees.
  6.    They lost one position on the State Board of Education.
  7.    They lost an incumbent Michigan State Supreme Court Justice.
  8.    They lost two incumbent U.S. Congressmen.
  9.    They lost the U.S. Senate race.
10.    They lost the presidential race.
11.    They lost the fight against Proposal 2, which legalizes and funds embryonic stem cell research.

These so-called “leaders” have now proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that their supposed pragmatism is really nothing more than unprincipled shortsightedness.  Their total ineffectiveness, their complete irrelevance to anything real, is now apparent to all.

Proposal 2 passed because of these people’s lack of conviction and focus on the true crime of embryonic stem cell research: it kills human beings, persons who have just as much right to live as anybody else.  A mountain of money was used, not to make the case for preserving the integrity of America’s most precious principles, but instead focused entirely on money issues.  The true stakes were obscured by their trivialization of the most important moral issue of our time.

Had they shown a human face, represented by the thousands of living “snowflake babies,” those children who had formerly been frozen embryos but who were adopted out and given life, as a comparison with the sterile medical term, “stem cell research,” the results would have likely been far different.  This doesn’t even take into account the huge amount of money that RLM, through its political arms, spent trying to elect a man who ran ads in the recent election promising to spend millions more of the taxpayers’ dollars on life-destroying embryonic stem cell research: Senator John McCain.

The extent to which Right to Life of Michigan is willing to play all political sides was best conveyed by the Michigan State Senate Leader, Mike Bishop (R) when, in 2004, he and his pro-abortion Democrat opponent received a co-endorsement from RLM.  

Senator Bishop:

“For me, the issue of life is a core conviction not subject to the whims of political expediency.  I stand by my votes for life and with those who supported me, but I cannot stand up for an organization, which through a co-endorsement, makes a mockery of the principles and ideals upon which the organization was founded.  If a candidate with a 92% approval rating from Planned Parenthood is as worthy of endorsement as the candidate with a 100% pro-life voting record, then something is fundamentally flawed in the way that organization chooses their endorsements.  Then again maybe it is a wake-up call for the grassroots supporters to reevaluate who their leaders are.”

But there is a new day dawning.  We have been inspired this year by the courageous efforts of those in Colorado who worked tirelessly to put their Personhood Amendment, which recognizes the unalienable right to life of all from the moment of fertilization, on the ballot. Their efforts resulted in the gathering of more than twice as many petition signatures as required to do so. While the effort did not succeed at the ballot box this time, there is new momentum all over the nation to introduce and pass Personhood and Human Life Amendments.  One of the brand new organizations founded to help in these efforts, Personhood USA, cites 16 states that already have initiatives underway.

So all is not lost.  New leadership brings with it new hope.  Those of us who believe that the right to life is unalienable shall continue to pursue the protection of unborn children through the ratification of Personhood Amendments, state by state.  For the sake of our babies, let us hope and pray that the compromised leaders of the past come to their senses and begin to do what is right.  Regardless of whether they do or not, we are going forward, with or without them.

Judy Zabik is spokesperson for Flint Area Right to Life and Black Americans for Life (http://www.FlintRTL.com) in Flint, Michigan, Board member of Genesee County Republican Party, Treasurer for Alan Keyes for President (http://www.alankeyes.com), and Treasurer for America’s Independent Party National Committee (http://www.aipnews.com).