Changing hearts and persuading minds about abortion

Valerie Schmalz writes in Our Sunday Visitor about how the pro-life movement is using grassroots efforts to change attitudes and beliefs about abortion and related life issues:

Transforming the culture and changing hearts and minds are buzzwords of the pro-life movement that can be likened to the foreign policy approach of "soft power," a term coined in the 1990s by Harvard professor Joseph Nye, and most recently endorsed by the Bush administration's secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, in the war on terrorism. As promulgated by Nye, a liberal foreign-policy thinker, "soft power" is the ability to attract others by the legitimacy of policies and the values that underlie them. The concept of persuasion has always been at the heart of the pro-life movement, but with the legislative and judicial fronts focused on defending incremental legislation such as state informed consent and parental notification laws, many Catholic and pro-life activists and pundits have renewed emphasis on outreach.

"Our work can go on no matter who is in the Oval Office," said Care Net spokeswoman Kristin Hansen. There are approximately 2,300 crisis pregnancy centers in North America, including the 1,100 pregnancy centers in the Care Net network. Heartbeat International and Care Net jointly own and operate Optionline.org, which has 800,000 contact per year, Hansen said. Optionline.org has a ZIP code locater for pregnancy centers. The Virtue Media website also directs women to the Optionline.org directory.

"While legislative efforts to protect the unborn and women from abortion may be limited in future years, the work of pregnancy centers is advancing stronger than ever before, and in places where our help is needed most -- our nation's inner cities," Care Net president Melinda Delahoyde said in a statement. She cited the work of former Philadelphia Eagles tailback, the Rev. Herbert H. Lusk II. On Nov. 7, Rev. Lusk and his People for People community organization opened a new pregnancy center, The Hope Center, in inner-city Philadelphia.

Read the entire article.

Meanwhile, Anne Hendershott, professor of urban studies at The King's College in New York and the author of The Politics of Abortion (Encounter Books, 2007), describes in the Wall Street Journal how the Kennedy family—the most high profile "Catholic" clan in the U.S.—went from being pro-life to pro-abortion:

Even Ted Kennedy, who gets a 100% pro-choice rating from the abortion-rights group Naral, was at one time pro-life. In fact, in 1971, a full year after New York had legalized abortion, the Massachusetts senator was still championing the rights of the unborn. In a letter to a constituent dated Aug. 3, 1971, he wrote: "When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception."

But that all changed in the early '70s, when Democratic politicians first figured out that the powerful abortion lobby could fill their campaign coffers (and attract new liberal voters). Politicians also began to realize that, despite the Catholic Church's teachings to the contrary, its bishops and priests had ended their public role of responding negatively to those who promoted a pro-choice agenda.

In some cases, church leaders actually started providing "cover" for Catholic pro-choice politicians who wanted to vote in favor of abortion rights. At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a "clear conscience."

The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book "The Birth of Bioethics" (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.

On a related note, David Mills, a former Episcopalian, writes for InsideCatholic.com of how Catholic teaching about contraceptives played a role in his decision to become Catholic:

The Church's teaching on contraception was not the only thing that drew us to the Church, of course, but it ranked high, not least because the teaching so thoroughly contradicted everything we had been taught that it had to be either the truth held with supernatural aid or a delusion held for any number of foolish or corrupt reasons.
 
Everyone I knew, well into my early thirties, assumed that sexual activity without the "risk" of children was perfectly natural and that the number and spacing of your children was something for you to decide. Even among Christians, no one would have blinked at a married couple who said that they were not going to have children, as long as they in some way (perfunctorily was okay) invoked God's will.
 
When my fiancé and I went to our Episcopal church for the required premarital counseling, one of the first questions we were asked is what method of birth control we would be using. We didn't know well anyone with more than two children, and I strain to remember anyone we knew at all with four. I remember meeting, when I was about 30, a minister with five children and feeling, even then, that I had met a mythical animal.

Read his entire essay.

Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Book Excerpts:

• The Case Against Abortion | An Interview with Dr. Francis Beckwith, author of Defending Life
• What Is "Legal"? On Abortion, Democracy, and Catholic Politicians | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• The Illusion of Freedom Separated from Moral Virtue | Raymond L. Dennehy
• What Is Catholic Social Teaching? | Mark Brumley
• Introduction to Three Approaches to Abortion | Peter Kreeft
• Some Atrocities are Worse than Others | Mary Beth Bonacci

Comments

[Dan Deeny]

Thank you for this info on the abortion business. It is very good to hear about the work of Rev. Lusk. Now, if we can just get his work on the MSM. That would shake things up ... maybe.