Special to The Record
Joseph Scheidler, National Director of the Pro-Life Action League, based in Chicago, told Kentucky Right to Life activists at their annual convention in Louisville, that despite recent election setbacks, the pro-life movement has always been about more than winning an election.
Speaking to about 200 people at the organization’s Nov. 10 convention at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Scheidler said “it’s a blessing to be born at a time like this, when other generations have gone through life without a cause.”
“Christ calls us to do his work,” Scheidler said of efforts to restore legal protection to unborn children and to save women from a lifetime of pain and grief.
Scheidler has spent years leading peaceful sidewalk counseling outside abortion clinics and protesting pro-abortion politicians, as well as educating citizens through the use of large graphic abortion posters.
“No social movement has ever succeeded without showing the victim,” Scheidler emphasized.
The former director of the Illinois Right to Life Committee said that recently 22 women cancelled their abortion appointments after witnessing firsthand, along the roadside, one of Scheidler’s “Face the Truth” tours.
Scheidler called pro-life activists, “the cream of the crop,” and the “communion of saints” for their steadfast efforts to inform society of the physical and psychological risks of abortion, and to battle on despite political setbacks.
Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, echoed a similar theme.
Unlike abortion proponents, Tobias said the pro-life movement has always “looked out for women” in the drive to enact protective state measures such as informed consent, ultrasound and abortion bans once a baby is scientifically capable of feeling pain.
Tobias urged her listeners to encourage young people to enter journalism, so that reporting on the life issues will be fair and accurate.
She said pro-life groups will continue to join the Catholic Church and Christian businesses in opposing the federal HHS mandate compelling employers to pay for abortion drugs, sterilizations and birth control despite their conscience objections.
Dr. Jack Willke, one of the founders of the Right to Life movement , and his wife, Barbara, also spoke at the conference. Both received the White Rose/Red Rose Award for a lifetime of dedication to the “weak and vulnerable.”
