A well-known line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid comes to mind. The amiable outlaws, hard as they try, can’t shake a pursuing posse. “Who are these guys?,” they keep asking. All that Butch and Sundance can be sure of is some uncomfortable destiny associated with learning the answer to their urgent question.
In like manner, who are the “guys”—and, I might add, the “girls”—on the right-to-life front who just keep acomin’ when you’d think they’d have given up by now, all lost and tuckered-out?
Instead they seem to be throwing the seemingly triumphant “reproductive freedom” lobby into fits of anxiety. Who are they, anyway? Just a few dogged outriders, or an agency capable of restoring in large measure the constitutional rights of the unborn?
I believe the indicated answer is, we’ll see. However, what right-to-life folk see, and with some delight, is the burgeoning of grassroots resistance to the doctrine that should you occupy room in the womb, your mom enjoys the right to evict you without notice.
A little distinction-making activity is in order at this point. Never, since Roe v. Wade first came down, in 1973, have the so-called grassroots been somnolent concerning the aforesaid right, rightly identified by them as no right at all, rather a violation of a sacred command to save, when possible, that which the Maker has made. There have been since the ’70s, protests in front of abortion clinics; there have been vigils, rallies in Washington, face-to-face reasonings with political leaders. There have been lawsuits and sermons and phone banks and polls and magazines (e.g., this one) and everything else you can think of connected to the elusive, as it happens, goal of reclaiming official respect for unborn life.
Is it all, at last, starting to pay off? – from The Human Life Review
