Pro-Life Groups Respond to
Pro-Abortion March Participants

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor

Washington, DC (April 26, 2004)—A few hundred thousand people attended Sunday's march for abortion, significantly less than the one million people organizers expected. However large the number, pro-life groups say the march participants don't represent most Americans.

"The pro-abortion activists marching in Washington represent the extreme, not the consensus," says Genevieve Wood of the Family Research Council. "Rather, with the passing of each year the views espoused by groups like Planned Parenthood and NARAL become more and more extreme, while the nation becomes more and more pro-life."

Wood pointed to a new poll conducted by Zogby International showing that more people describe themselves as "pro-life" than "pro-choice" and 56 percent of Americans take a pro-life position on abortion compared with 42 percent who supported a pro-abortion stance.

In describing the pro-abortion march, Wood said organizers couldn't find enough people who supported abortion to attend. As a result anti-Bush, anti-war, and anti-globalization protesters were invited to swell the ranks.

"If there was such an outcry from American women to further the abortion-on-demand agenda, the groups marching today would not have had to open their rally to anti-war, anti-Bush and all sorts of other protesters just to fill the national mall," Wood said.

Meanwhile, Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life said those marching fail to understand the "choice" they're advocating. Pavone said the descriptions used by the abortion practitioners themselves during the trials of the partial-birth abortion ban should offend most people.

"The abortionists describe the crushing of babies' heads and the dismemberment of their bodies, and they use those words," Pavone said.

"Our challenge for those who march, therefore, is to tell us all whether the abortions you want kept legal are the same procedures being described under oath by those who perform them. It is our presumption that marchers are proud of that for which they march. If you publicly march for abortion, then publicly describe it," Father Pavone said.

FRC's Wood points to the passage of pro-life legislation in Congress with clear bipartisan majorities as more evidence that a majority of Americans are pro-life.

"Several pieces of pro-life legislation that have been passed or at least introduced in Congress over the past several years have had the support of between 70 and 90 percent of Americans, but these pro-abortion groups have opposed them all," Wood said.

"Americans want partial-birth abortion banned, but Planned Parenthood is fighting to keep it legal," Wood explained. "Americans wanted the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, but NARAL opposed it. And today, Americans want laws passed to require parental consent for a minor to have an abortion, but yet again, these groups are fighting to stop it."

Pavone says those marching for abortion won't win the abortion debate.

"In my full-time travels throughout the United States over the past 11 years, it has become clear that year by year the pro-life cause is winning more and more adherents," Pavone explained.

"Many of these are among the young; many others are among those who thought years ago that abortion was a solution, and have found through dreadful personal experience that it is a dead end," Pavone concluded.

Related web sites:
Family Research Council - http://www.frc.org
Priests for Life - http://www.priestsforlife.org