Today is the first March for Life since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade and sent the question of abortion back to the states.
As Nicole Wells reported for NewsMax, establishing a national limit on abortion is one of the new post-Roe goals for march organizers and other anti-abortion leaders, who are urging the new Republican House majority to pass legislation restricting the killing of unborn children.
However, such legislation would stand little chance of being adopted by the Democrat-controlled Senate and state-focused efforts have largely ended in failure with the defeat of pro-life ballot initiatives or in the case of Michigan, passage of an initiative that makes killing a baby through abortion a right under Michigan law.
"This year will be a somber reminder of the millions of lives lost to abortion in the past 50 years, but also a celebration of how far we have come and where we as a movement need to focus our effort as we enter this new era in our quest to protect life," Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, said in a statement reported by Ms. Wells.
Anti-abortion leaders want to present a united front as they mark the moment, but there are divisions among Republicans, state and congressional lawmakers and those within the movement on the way forward in light of last election cycles’ defeats and the unique circumstances of each state.
For example, in Florida pro-life leaders disagree over the utility of proposed constitutional amendments that would supplement the existing protections for the unborn enacted in the state’s 15-week abortion limit.
In the Sunshine State the ability to protect the unborn is limited by a state version of Roe vs. Wade. This bad case, decided by the Florida Supreme Court in 1989, is called “In Re TW, A Minor.” This case, decided by a left-leaning activist court, created a state right to abortion using a good informational privacy clause in our state constitution (adopted by Floridians in 1980).
The current Florida strategy, agreed upon by the leading state and national pro-life leaders and pro-life lawyers, is to get rid of this bad case the same way we got rid of Roe vs. Wade with the Dobbs case. Bad judges created the abortion right in Florida, and now most pro-life leaders believe good judges in Florida will reverse and overturn it.
As our friend John Stemberg of the Florida Family Policy Council explained in an email to pro-life leaders, it is critical to understand that the text of the Florida constitution is not the problem. Instead, the problem lies with the liberal activist judges on the state Supreme Court in 1989 that clearly misinterpreted it. Therefore, Floridians do not need to amend the state Constitution to “fix” it because there is no abortion right in it – but so far that wise council has not discouraged the good and sincere proponents of a Florida pro-life constitutional amendment.
Here’s what CHQ Chairman Richard A Viguerie said back in March of 2022, and it will continue to apply to the battles we will face between now and the 2024 election:
Conservatives surveying today’s political battlefield seem convinced that victory is in their hands and that all they have to do is keep doing what they’ve been doing for the past thirty years, and a big victory in the 2022 midterms will be handed to them on a silver platter.
This kind of overconfidence has been the bane of conservatives and Republicans for as long as I’ve been involved in politics, now over 60-years. My good friend Morton Blackwell calls it succumbing to the Sir Galahad theory of politics – we will win because we are self-evidently right.
However, as the Bible tells us in 1 Samuel 4:2-11, the overconfidence of the Israelites, brought on by having the Ark of the Covenant in their camp before a great battle with the Philistines, was their undoing. When the Ark arrived, the Israelites raised a great shout and the Philistines hearing it resolved to fight all that much harder, or as the Bible says:
Be strong and quit yourselves like men, O ye Philistines, that ye be not servants unto the Hebrews, as they have been to you: quit yourselves like men, and fight. And the Philistines fought, and Israel was smitten, and they fled every man into his tent: and there was a very great slaughter…
There was indeed a great shout raised in the conservative and pro-life camp, but it also without doubt caused our political enemies to resolve themselves to fight with a ferocity never before seen in American politics.
And we conservatives are not ready for that onslaught.
When Donald Trump was elected President in November 2016, Planned Parenthood had 400,000 supporters—12 months later they had 1,600,000. In addition to Planned Parenthood, there are many other Leftwing groups promoting abortion until birth and beyond, which results in killing of over 1,000,000 babies a year, including:
Guttmacher Institute 2019 Income -- $24,255,758
NARAL Pro-Choice America 2019 Income -- $12,400,056
National Network of Abortion Funds 2020 Income -- $20,343,642
(National and 27 affiliates)
Center for Reproductive Rights 2020 Income -- $38,755,766
Plus, many other groups
In 2020, 188 pro-abortion groups had income of $3.4 billion.
No need to wonder why Planned Parenthood and their allies are continuing to win the public relations battle.
The Left also has dozens of billionaires who routinely spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on Leftwing politics, causes, and projects, but there is not one conservative major donor who comes close to being a Mark Zuckerberg, who contributed $417 million in 2020 to dozens of liberal organizations to increase the Democrat vote. In addition to Zuckerberg, Democrats have many others including George Soros, Jeff Bezos, McKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos’ former wife), Warren Buffett, Mike Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, and Bill Gates.
Quite frankly the problem is not at the grassroots level; it’s complacency and the “prevent defense” mentality among the leaders of the Republican establishment, and the lack of a risk-taking, entrepreneurial spirit on the part of those who run conservative organizations.
Grassroots conservatives are worried, frustrated, and angry. They fear for America’s future and want and need leadership—but it’s in short supply these days.
According to a report by Hayden Ludwig at the Capital Research Center, “Between 2000 and 2018, the [Susan Thompson] Buffett Foundation poured an incredible $4 billion into left-wing groups that lobby for abortion-on-demand policies and public funding of birth control.”
The Left will have billions of dollars at their disposal, and they are energized like nothing we’ve seen before now that Roe has been overturned. To counter them we conservatives need bold, high-energy, entrepreneurial leaders who understand what will be needed to lead conservative and pro-life forces to victory in 2023 and 2024.
We welcome our pro-life friends to Washington for this year’s March for Life, but we hope that with thousands of pro-life activists and leaders in Washington the movement will come to agree that we can’t win doing business as usual and that bold, high-energy, entrepreneurial conservative leaders must come to the fore and get our movement ready to win.
Roe v. Wade
March for Life
Jeanne Mancini
state limits on abortion
15-week limit
Dobbs case
John Stemberg
Florida Family Policy Council
Planned Parenthood
pro-life grassroots organizing
conservative organizations