Tidbits on Life

 

Eye-Opening National Right To Life Convention!

 

By Michelle Laque Johnson
Editor’s note. This appeared July 2 on “Inside EWTN.” 
This past week, EWTN Executive VP & COO Doug Keck and I had the opportunity to participate in the National Right to Life Convention in Dallas. NRLC employs some top-notch people who are doing incredible behind-the-scenes work at the state and national level to save the lives of unborn babies. (If you’d like to get involved, click here: https://www.nrlc.org/.)
As many pro-lifers know, science shows that unborn babies begin to feel pain at about 20 weeks, spectator.org/blog/2013/06/25/texas-likely-to-pass-strict-ab. NRTL is spearheading an effort, which has been successful in nine states, to ban abortions after 20 weeks. Since it is almost certain to pass, Texas Senator Wendy Davis tried to block a vote last week on the fetal pain bill with a 13-hour filibuster. While she succeeded in preventing a vote that day, Texas Governor Rick Perry, who addressed the Convention along with U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, vowed to bring it to a vote – and soon!

Working behind the scenes is NRLC’s Mary Spaulding Balch, who Texas Right to Life leaders credit with crafting the legal strategy which has been so successful in the states which have passed the bill. A fetal pain bill has also passed the U.S. House of Representatives, but not the Senate. Should it pass, the Administration is threatening a veto of the bill which they say “unacceptably restrict[s] women’s health and reproductive rights and is an assault on a woman’s right to choose.”
The Texas Right to Life folks told us during a dinner that pro-abortion protestors are often bused into sites and paid to protest. What a contrast to pro-lifers who show up voluntarily and never receive a dime!

One of our favorite workshops was called “When They Say… You Say…” with NRLC’s Olivia Gans Turner and Spaulding. The two women said that pro-abortion arguments can be boiled down to five basic categories and they showed participants how to respond to them. If you’d like to learn how to do this yourself, go here: www.nrlc.org/abortion/facts/abortionresponses.html.

At the Convention’s final night banquet, Keynote Speaker Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, blew everyone away with her presentation. Littlejohn, who graced EWTN with her presence during our coverage of Canada’s National March for Life, spoke about China’s one-child policy (or, in certain circumstances, two children if the first is a girl). Littlejohn is a lawyer who has represented women who have undergone brutal forced abortions and been sterilized – often without anesthesia. Many of these women have lifelong health problems after these attacks which Littlejohn said can occur up all the way up to the actual birth.
This brave pro-life activist showed heart-wrenching clips from an upcoming film, “It’s a Girl,” which shows the brutality of China’s policy. For example, one woman in the film whose baby was forcibly aborted was told afterwards that she had to pay for the child’s burial. However, she had no money so officials placed the dead baby beside her on the bed and told her it was up to her to bury the child. It’s difficult to watch, but a photo of this atrocity is there for all to see.

Because baby girls are being targeted in China, Littlejohn said there are now 118 to 120 boys born for every 100 girls. This means many men cannot find wives, which makes it very dangerous to be a woman in China. In addition to forced abortion and sterilization, she said women and children are being abducted and sold into sexual slavery.
As a result of these heinous crimes against women, more than 500 Chinese women commit suicide every day! This is the REAL “war against women” and there’s even more to it than I can convey in this short blog post.

Think this can’t happen in the United States? Littlejohn quoted CNN President Ted Turner who said [at the 2010 Cancun climate change conference] that the entire world should adopt a One Child Policy like China’s. In a letter to Turner on Littlejohn’s website,  she takes him to task for this and expresses outrage that he would call this policy “voluntary” and “not draconian.”
During the banquet, Littlejohn also mentioned a number of other prominent U.S. officials including former U.S. Senator and Presidential Candidate John Kerry, who is now Secretary of State. A little research shows that, at a NARAL Pro-Choice America Dinner, Kerry told attendees they should “be proud of what we stand for” and set forth his hope that there be “no more cutbacks on population control efforts around the world.”
Find out more about China’s One Child Policy and what you can do about it here: womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org.

EWTN salutes NRLC and pro-life warriors across all faiths for standing in the breach!
Look to see more pro-life warriors like these in future programs on EWTN, the only television network that provides full coverage of America’s March for Life and West Coast Walk for Life, Canada’s National March for Life – and so much more!
Michelle Laque Johnson, former editor-in-chief of The Catholic Standard & Times in Philadelphia and current Director of Communications at EWTN Global Catholic Network, believes abortion and all the other “life” issues are the most important human and civil rights issues of our times. This first appeared at insideewtn.wordpress.com

Source: NRLC News