Take A Second Look at Abortion

http://www.secondlookproject.org/ is the link to a great site for facts. FACTS, not opinion. I recommend you take a walk through this site. Below is a sample of just one small area of all that is there:

	Roe Reality Check
	Download English		Download Spanish

Brief, informational booklet highlighting 15 basic facts about Roe v. Wade
or its impact.

To order full-color print copies, call 1-866-582-0943 and ask for Item #0532.

#1:	Abortion is legal through all 9 months of pregnancy.

#2:	Abortions are rarely done for maternal or fetal health problems, or in cases of rape or incest.

#3:	Most Americans actually oppose U.S. abortion law.

#4:	Legal commentators who support legal abortion have said Roe is not good constitutional law.

#5:	Supreme Court Justices have criticized Roe v. Wade.

#6:	The U.S. abortion rate is among the highest of all developed countries in the world.

#7:	Most American women do not support Roe v. Wade.

#8:	Most abortions are done after the fetal heart has begun beating.

#9:	Nearly half of all abortions are performed on women who have had at least one.

#10:	Even a child who is partially born can be legally aborted. — UPDATED, see note below.

#11:	If Roe is overturned, abortion policy will be decided through the democratic process in each state.

#12:	Roe has often been cited by state and federal judges to endanger human beings already born.

#13:	Abortion is outside mainstream medicine.

#14:	Legalized abortion has made it easy for others to pressure women into having abortions.

---

#1	myth: “High Court Rules Abortions Legal the First 3 Months.”[1]
	FACT: Abortion is legal through all 9 months of pregnancy.

In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court ruled that abortion may not be restricted at all in the first trimester.[2] In the second trimester abortion may be regulated only for the mother’s health.[3] After “viability,” abortion may be prohibited except where necessary to preserve the mother’s health. [4]

Roe’s companion case, Doe v. Bolton, defined maternal “health” as: “all factors - physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age - relevant to the well-being of the patient.”[5]

Thus, abortion is legal -- and cannot be prohibited -- in the 7th, 8th, or 9th months of pregnancy if any of these reasons is invoked.[6]

“[N]o significant legal barriers of any kind whatsoever exist today in the United States for a woman to obtain an abortion for any reason during any stage of her pregnancy.”[7]

---

#2	myth: Most abortions are done because of maternal or fetal health problems, or in cases of rape or incest.
	FACT: Abortions are rarely done for these reasons.

According to an Alan Guttmacher Institute survey,[8] women cite these as the main reason for an abortion in a very small percentage of cases each year:

• 1% “rape or incest”
• 3% “woman has health problem” (physical or mental)
• 3% “fetus has possible health problem”[9]

For all other abortions, the main reason cited is:

• 21% “unready for responsibility”
• 21% “can't afford baby now”
• 16% “concerned about how having a baby could change her life”
• 12% “has problems with relationship or wants to avoid single parenthood”
• 11% “is not mature enough, or is too young to have a child”
• 8% “has all the children she wanted, or has all grown-up children”
• 1% “husband or partner wants woman to have abortion”
• 1% “doesn't want others to know she has had sex or is pregnant”
• <0.5%>
• 3% “other”

Under Roe v. Wade, abortions for these reasons or any other reason must be legally permitted.[10]

---

#3	myth: Most Americans favor U.S. abortion law.
	FACT: Most Americans actually oppose it.

A recent Harris Interactive poll claims 52% of Americans favor Roe v. Wade and 47% oppose it.[11] But the poll describes Roe as "the U.S. Supreme Court decision making abortions up to three months of pregnancy legal."

That's wrong. The fact is, Roe made abortion legal through all 9 months of pregnancy.[12]

In the same poll, 72% of Americans said abortion should be illegal in the second three months of pregnancy, and 86% said abortion should be illegal in the last three months of pregnancy.

Even support for abortion in the first three months is open to question. In a 2004 Zogby International poll, 61% of Americans said abortion should not be permitted after the fetal heartbeat has begun.[13] This occurs in the first month.[14]

So why do 52% of Americans say they favor Roe v. Wade?

Because they don't really know what Roe did.

---

#4	Roe said the Constitution includes a right to abortion.
	Yet even legal commentators who support legal abortion have said Roe is not good constitutional law.

Roe v. Wade is "a very bad decision...because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."[15]

- John Hart Ely, Yale Law School professor

"As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible… [It is] one of the most intellectually suspect constitutional decisions of the modern era."[16]

- Edward Lazarus, former clerk to Justice Blackmun (who authored Roe)

"Since its inception Roe has had a deep legitimacy problem, stemming from its weakness as a legal opinion."[17]

- Benjamin Wittes, Washington Post legal affairs editorial writer

"One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found."[18]

- Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School professor

---

#5 Supreme Court justices have criticized Roe v. Wade.

"I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment" in Roe v. Wade.[19]

- Justice Byron White

"This Court's abortion decisions have already worked a major distortion in the Court's constitutional jurisprudence…no legal rule or doctrine is safe from ad hoc nullification by this Court … in a case involving state regulation of abortion."[20]

- Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

Roe v. Wade "destroyed the compromises of the past, [and] rendered compromise impossible for the future… [T]o portray Roe as the statesmanlike 'settlement' of a divisive issue…is nothing less than Orwellian."[21]

- Justice Antonin Scalia

Roe v. Wade "was grievously wrong."[22]

- Justice Clarence Thomas

"Roe v. Wade…ventured too far in the change it ordered and presented an incomplete justification for its action."[23]

-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

---

#6	myth: The U.S. abortion rate is relatively low.
	FACT: It is among the highest of all developed countries in the world.

In 1973 the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade deemed "every [abortion] law - even the most liberal - as unconstitutional."[24]

Today the U.S. has the highest abortion rate in the western world, and the third-highest of all developed nations worldwide.[25]

There are 1.31 million induced abortions annually in the U.S., or 3,500 every day.

24.5% of all U.S. pregnancies end in abortion or 3,500 every day; 24.5% of all U.S. pregnancies end in abortion. [26]

---

#7	myth: Most American women support Roe v. Wade.
	FACT: Most do not.

Roe v. Wade legalized abortion throughout pregnancy, for virtually any reason[27].

Yet according to a national survey of women published by the Center for Gender Equality, "only 30% think abortion should be generally available."[28]

In fact, most women say abortion should be substantially limited or never permitted:

• 17% said abortion should never be permitted.
• 34% said abortion should be permitted only in cases of rape, incest, and to save the woman's life.[29]

And when asked to rank 12 issues in order of importance for the women's movement, women ranked "Keeping abortion legal" next to last.[30]

---

#8	myth: Most abortions are done before fetal organs are functioning.
	FACT: Actually, the vast majority are done after the fetal heart has begun beating.

♦

A fetal heart begins to beat at about 21 or 22 days after fertilization.[31]

That's at about 3 weeks of development.

77% of abortions in the United States are done well after this point.[32]

---

#9	myth: U.S. abortion law has not encouraged the use of abortion as a method of birth control.
	FACT: Nearly half of all abortions are performed on women who have already had at least one.

Today, 48% of women having an abortion in the United States have had at least one previous abortion.[33]

In some states the rate of repeat abortions is much higher.

In Maryland, for example, 71.4% of those having an abortion

have already had at least one. And 16.4% have had at least three prior abortions.[34]

---

PLEASE NOTE: Reality Check #10, first written in 2005, has been updated in light of the Supreme Court’s majority decision in Gonzalez v. Carhart (April 2007).

#10	myth: Abortion is legal only when the fetus is in the womb.
	FACT: Even a child who is partially-born can be legally aborted.

Partial-birth abortion kills a fetus during the process of delivery.

At first, abortion providers said it was rare, and used only on women whose lives were in danger or whose fetuses were damaged.

But Ron Fitzsimmons, then the Executive Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, admitted he had "lied through my teeth."[35]

He admitted that most partial-birth abortions are not done for "extreme circumstances" but are "primarily done on healthy women and healthy fetuses."[36]

In 2000 the Supreme Court said states cannot ban partial-birth abortion even with an exception to save the mother's life.

The Court said such a ban violates "the woman's right to choose" established by Roe v. Wade.[37]

UPDATE:

In the April 2007 case, Gonzales vs. Carhart, the Court upheld a federal ban on partial-birth abortion, saying it is not unconstitutionally vague, and does not impose an undue burden on a woman's right to an abortion. The ban defines partial-birth abortion in terms of precise anatomical markers, depending on whether the fetus is delivered head-first or in a breach presentation. A partial-birth abortion is an abortion procedure in which the practitioner:

"(A) deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother, for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the partially delivered living fetus; and

"(B) performs the overt act, other than completion of delivery, that kills the partially delivered living fetus. ..."

---

#11	myth: If Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortion will automatically be illegal in the U.S.
	FACT: If Roe is overturned, abortion policy will be decided through the democratic process in each state.

Before Roe v. Wade, all states permitted abortion if necessary to save the mother's life, and some permitted abortion in additional circumstances.[38]

But Roe deemed "every [abortion] law - even the most liberal - as unconstitutional."[39]

As a result, no state can prohibit any abortion at any time during pregnancy.[40]

If Roe is overturned, policy decisions about abortion will be made by the citizens of each state through the democratic process, rather than by courts.

Some states will place limits on abortion, in others there will likely be few limits.[41]

Not until Roe v. Wade is reversed
will the people be able to govern themselves again
on the important public policy issue of abortion.

---

#12	myth: Roe v. Wade is only about a woman’s right to abortion, not about a right to take life in general.
	FACT: Roe has often been cited by state and federal judges to endanger human beings already born.

In 1986, relying on Roe, the Supreme Court invalidated a law intended to ensure care for children born alive during attempted abortions.[42]

In 1983, a U.S. district court invalidated a federal regulation to prevent medical neglect of handicapped newborns in hospitals receiving federal funds. The court said the regulation may “infringe upon the interests outlined in cases such as … Roe v. Wade.”[43]

In 1980, a New York court cited Roe in a “right to die” case, arguing that the “claim to personhood” of a terminally ill comatose patient “is certainly no greater than that of the fetus.”[44]

In 1993, a Michigan judge cited Roe in dismissing criminal charges against Jack Kevorkian and declaring that the state law against assisted suicide was unconstitutional.[45]

And in 1996, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit relied heavily on Roe and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in finding a constitutional “right” to assisted suicide.[46]

While some of these rulings were later modified or reversed, they all underscore how Roe v. Wade has been used to argue that ideas of privacy and liberty can trump life itself -- after as well as before birth.

---

#13	myth: Abortion is standard medical practice; only religious hospitals and some physicians refuse to provide it.
	FACT: Even abortion advocates acknowledge that abortion is outside mainstream medicine.

The vast majority (86%) of all U.S. hospitals whether religious or secular, public or private, do not participate in abortions.[47]

71% of abortions in the United States are performed in free-standing abortion-dedicated clinics. Only 5% are performed in hospitals, 2% in physicians’ offices and 22% in other kinds of clinics.[48]

A New York Times Magazine article reports, “The overwhelming majority of abortions are performed by a small group of doctors. (Some 2 percent of OB-GYN’s carry the burden, performing more than 25 per month).”[49]

The medical community’s stigmatization of abortion is acknowledged by Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, which says one of its “primary strategic goals is to eradicate the stigma that has become attached to abortion and abortion providers within mainstream healthcare.”[50]

---

#14	myth: Roe v. Wade empowers women to choose freely whether abortion is their best option.
	FACT: Legalized abortion has made it easy for others to pressure women into having abortions.

Not freedom, but “lack of control over one’s life” is associated with high abortion rates, as is “lack of financial and social resources.”^[51]

An on-line survey of women who had abortions showed that many women feel pressured by the baby’s father: 85% of fathers offered no encouragement to continue the pregnancy. When women said they wanted to continue the pregnancy, the fathers’ dominant reactions were; “Slightly Upset 60%, Mad 38%, Very Angry 43%”, compared to “Happy .7%.” 73% of fathers suggested an abortion. ^[52]

80% of the women surveyed experienced guilt, 83% regret, 79% loss, 62% anger, and 70% depression.

Even a website which encourages women to consider abortion “so they can freely decide if it is their choice”^[53] elsewhere posts personal stories describing pressure, coercion or abandonment by the baby’s father.[54]

Seven States Have Launched Efforts for Personhood Rights for Pre-born - More Expected

Seven States Have Launched Efforts for Personhood Rights for Pre-born - More Expected

DENVER, February 18, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Personhood USA has announced that since the beginning of the new year, seven different states have started efforts in support of the personhood of pre-born children. In addition, Rep. Duncan Hunter has introduced H.R. 881, the Right to Life Act, on the federal level, propelling the personhood movement forward.

Five States have now introduced bills affirming the personhood rights of pre-born humans from the moment of fertilization, including:

Maryland - HB925 - Delegate Don Dwyer
North Dakota - H.R. 1572 - Rep. Dan Ruby
Montana - SB 406 - Sen. Daniel W McGee
South Carolina - H.3526 - Rep. Liston Barfield
Alabama - SB-335 - Sen. Hank Erwin

Oregon has also begun a personhood amendment petition drive, and Mississippi's personhood amendment petition drive is expected to launch within weeks.

The common thread among all of these efforts is the goal to fill what is becoming known as the "Blackmun Hole" in Roe v. Wade. This is where Justice Blackmun implied in the Roe v. Wade decision that if the case were established that the pre-born human being was a person, the argument for abortion collapses. In Roe v Wade, it is acknowledged that the "fetus" is fully human, but the decision did not grant the rights of "persons" until birth.

"Personhood USA is standing with strong support for all of these efforts. We are committed to working tirelessly to establish personhood in every State, because this is the only way to restore dignity to the humans most vulnerable among us," stated Cal Zastrow of Personhood USA.

"Personhood efforts raise the standard of what it is to be pro-life. We expect that as the understanding that all humans are people spreads, the injustice of abortion will end," continued Keith Mason of Personhood USA.

Personhood USA is a grassroots Christian organization founded to establish personhood efforts across America to create protection for every child.

Twenty-five Years After Roe: Sliding Into Infanticide

Thursday January 15, 2009
Twenty-five Years After Roe: Sliding Into Infanticide

by Rick Hinshaw

(Catalyst 1/1998)

It is now 25 years since the Supreme Court declared unborn children to be non-persons, opening the floodgates to a slaughter of innocent human life unprecedented in our nation's history.

Pro-life people were horrified by Roe vs. Wade. They foresaw the mass destruction of pre-born life which it would unleash; and they also warned, as National Journal senior writer Michael Kelly recently recalled, "that the widespread acceptance of abortion would lead to a profound moral shift in our culture, a great devaluing of human life."

Senator James Buckley of New York asked on the floor of the U.S. Senate whether America would continue to uphold the "supreme value" of human life, or whether, in the wake of Roe vs. Wade, the sanctity of life would be "downgraded to one of a number of values to be weighed in determining whether a particular life shall be terminated?"

Others, however, dismissed such dire warnings, and until recently Kelly counted himself among those skeptics. "Why," he reasoned, "should a tolerance for ending human life under one, very limited, set of conditions necessarily lead to an acceptance of ending human life under other, broader terms?"

Now, however, he has awakened to the clear connection between unrestricted abortion and our growing culture of death—a connection which, sadly, many in our own Church still cannot grasp, as they continue to dismiss abortion as "only one issue". What has finally convinced Kelly that "the pessimists were right"? Let him tell you in his own words (Washington Post, 11/6/97):

"On Sunday, Nov. 2, an article in the New York Times, the closest thing we have to the voice of the intellectual establishment, came out for killing babies." That's right, he's talking about killing babies after birth, as opposed to "terminating a pregnancy" by killing them before birth.

The column Kelly is referring to, by MIT psychology professor Steven Pinker, begins as an examination of the recent rash of killings of newborns by their mothers and, in at least one instance, by the father as well.

While conceding that he is "sensationalizing," but "only slightly," Kelly sees Pinker coming dangerously close to justifying, if not endorsing, infanticide. In Pinker's "modest proposal," writes Kelly, "mothers who kill their newborn infants should not be judged as harshly as people who take human life in its later stages because newborn infants are not persons in the full sense of the word, and therefore do not enjoy a right to life. Who says that life begins at birth?"

A reading of Pinker's column justifies Kelly's alarm, especially when we examine, step by step, the professor's "logic" in trying to define legal personhood.

He begins by dismissing the "anti-abortionists" who "draw the line at conception."

"That implies," he writes, "that we should shed tears every time an invisible conceptus fails to implant in the uterus." So if no one sheds tears at our death, you see, our life never really existed. By that utilitarian logic, there is no inherent value to human life; and our right to live is wholly dependent on the value which other people place on our existence.

Next, Pinker claims that "those in favor of abortion draw the line at viability." Not quite. Roe vs. Wade allows states to legalize abortion up to the moment of birth, and no less a force than the President of the United States, by his veto of a ban on partial-birth abortion, has upheld the unrestricted killing of children well past the point of viability.

Yet even this does not go far enough for Professor Pinker, who calls for a re-examination of the presumption that "the line must be drawn at some point before birth." Instead, he writes, "the moral philosophers say" that "the right to life" must derive "from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a unique sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect upon ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die. And there's the rub: our immature neonates don't possess these traits any more than mice do."

The logic will be familiar to anyone who has argued the abortion issue: Life has no inherent value. Personhood, and thus one's very right to exist, are dependent on a range of arbitrary factors—level of consciousness, connectedness to other people, awareness of life and death—that will be defined and determined by other human beings. Indeed, Pinker’s criteria for achieving personhood are very similar to those set forth by Mary Ann Warren in her 1973 essay "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion": "consciousness," of "internal" as well as "external" existence; "reasoning"; "self-motivated activity"; "the capacity to communicate"; and "self-awareness."

Even Pinker's use of semantics—labeling a newborn child a "neonate" rather than a "baby"—is of a piece with the pro-abortion strategy of dehumanizing the unborn child through the use of terms like "conceptus" or "fetus."

Of course, Pinker, while not disputing this logic, distances himself from it somewhat by attributing it to unnamed "moral philosophers." And indeed, what is perhaps most sobering about his column is that the ideas he expresses are not new, nor are they unique to him. They have long been standard fare among some in the intellectual and medical elite, who have advocated infanticide as a logical corollary to legalized abortion.

Dr. Joseph Fletcher, for instance, in his 1979 book, Humanhood: Essays in Biomedical Ethics, stated unequivocally that "both abortion and infanticide can be justified if and when the good to be gained outweighs the evil—that neither abortion nor infanticide is as such immoral."

When would the "good" to be gained by killing a newborn infant "outweigh the evil" of such an act? Well, when the baby had been so uncooperative as not to die during an attempted abortion, for one thing. Such babies should be given neonatal care only if the parents wish them to survive, said Dr. Mary Ellen Avery, chief of Boston Children’s Hospital, back in 1975. "There must be a right to dispose of an infant survivor of abortion," agreed abortionist Dr. Warren Hern (Denver Post, 2/2/77), who has since authored the leading textbook on late term abortion procedures.

Destroying children born with disabilities would be another "good" derived from infanticide. James Watson, Nobel laureate for DNA discovery, declared in 1973 that he would not "declare (a child) alive until three days after birth," in order to allow for the killing of newborn children with birth defects. His co-discoverer of DNA, Sir Francis Crick, concurred, stating that newborns should have to pass certain genetic tests before being granted the right to live. Geneticist Colin Austin said that personhood should not be declared until some time after birth, to allow for killing the deformed. John Lachs, Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that some defective infants are "beings that are only human-looking shapes," and should be put to death like animals.

University of California attorney F. Raymond Marks, speaking at the 1976 Sonoma Conference on Ethical Issues in Neonatal Intensive Care, asserted that the state’s interest in maintaining the lives of defective newborns was offset by the high cost of keeping them alive. "We would prefer a system that broadly defined a class of infants declared as non-persons who could be disposed of by their parents," he declared.

This brings us back to Pinker’s central theme, which is the key link between legalized abortion and legalized infanticide: de-humanizing those whom we wish to kill, in order to deny them legal personhood.

In the Aug. 11, 1969 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Robert Williams of Washington State Medical School said that he would not consider infants to be persons until near the end of their first year outside the womb, and that until that point he would justify infanticide. Nuclear physicist Winston Duke compared killing an infant to killing a chimpanzee.

In 1979 Michael Tooley, author of "A Defense of Abortion and Infanticide," flatly declared, "Since I do not believe human infants are persons, but only potential persons, and since I think that the destruction of potential persons is a morally neutral action, the correct conclusion seems to me to be that infanticide is in itself morally acceptable."

Mary Ann Warren reached the same conclusion, writing that "killing a newborn infant isn’t murder." And, despite her extensive list of attributes necessary for personhood, she ultimately decides that the right to kill a newborn infant depends, like abortion, solely on one factor: whether or not the child is "wanted." "When an unwanted or defective infant is born into a society which cannot afford and/or is not willing to care for it," she writes, "then its destruction is permissible."

Nor have such ideas been consigned solely to the realm of idle theorizing. Even before Roe vs. Wade there were reports of handicapped newborns being left to die without medical treatment.

"In 1973 I expressed the concern that abortion of somewhere between a million and two million unborn babies a year would lead to such cheapening of human life that infanticide would not be far behind," Dr. C. Everett Koop, later U.S. Surgeon General, said in a 1977 speech to the American Academy of Pediatrics entitled "The Slide to Auschwitz." "Well, you all know that infanticide is being practiced right now in this country…I am concerned that there is no outcry…I am concerned about this because when the first 273,000 German aged, infirm, and retarded were killed in gas chambers there was no outcry from that medical profession either, and it was not far from there to Auschwitz."

Incredibly, Professor Pinker warns in his column that we must establish "a clear boundary" for conferring personhood, lest "we approach a slippery slope that ends in the disposal of inconvenient people or in grotesque deliberations on the value of individual lives." He somehow fails to realize that we have long since begun our descent down that slippery slope, and that his column is itself one of those "grotesque deliberations."

Twenty-five years and more than 30 million deaths later, Michael Kelly is right to be alarmed. Roe vs. Wade has brought us to where we stand now. Either we restore protection to the unborn, or ultimately no human life will be safe.

http://www.catholicleague.org/rer.php?topic=Abortion&id=5

Novena of Reparation for Roe vs. Wade, January 14-22

Novena of Reparation for Roe vs. Wade, January 14-22

The Catholic bishops of the United States have designated January 22 as a special day of prayer and penance in reparation for the massive killing that has resulted from the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision (handed down January 22, 1973) which permitted abortion throughout pregnancy.

Therefore, we at Priests for Life invite you to prepare spiritually for that day by joining a Novena that starts on Monday, January 14 and concludes on the 22nd. We invite you to say the prayer below each of those days, and to let us know through this form that you have committed to say it.

Prayer of Reparation
(Spanish version -- En Español)

God and Father of Life,
You have created every human person,
And have opened the way for each to have eternal life.

We live in the shadow of death.
Tens of millions of your children have been killed
Thanks to the Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

Father, have mercy on us.
Heal our land
And accept our offering of prayer and penance.
In your love for us,
Turn back the scourge of abortion.


May each of us exult in hearts full of hope
And hands full of mercy
And work together to build a culture of life.

We pray through Christ our Lord. Amen.

2009 March For Life -- Special Message From Fr. Frank Pavone

Priests for Life
Gospel of Life Ministries

January-February 2009 Newsletter

December 30, 2008


As we enter a New Year, there's no doubt in my mind that there's one single force that can and will defeat the power of abortion in our world.

That is the Church, the Body of Christ, the fellowship of believers throughout the world united with the One who conquered death.

And that's why I'm glad you're part of the Priests for Life family. As the world's largest pro-life organization, we continue to focus on activating and mobilizing the Church, starting with the clergy, so that the Lord's promise, "the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church," will continue to be evident to all.

Below you'll find our January-February newsletter. Along with reading it yourself, would you be so kind as to bring it to the attention of your pastor?

Looking ahead, there are important events in January with the annual commemoration of Roe vs. Wade.

I'll be in Washington, of course, for the March for Life, and you can find details of my schedule at www.priestsforlife.org.

In particular, I urge you to join me for morning prayer with people of all denominations on the 22nd, and then at the conclusion of the march, join me in giving prayerful support to the women and men of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign who will stand in front of the US Supreme Court and give testimony to the pain and healing that followed their abortion experiences. (If you've lost a child by abortion, or want to help someone who has, please visit www.SilentNoMoreAwareness.org to join the campaign.)

On the 24th, join me for the West Coast Walk for Life to take place in San Francisco. I'll address the gathering at the conclusion of the Walk.

Let me also provide you with the upcoming schedules for our own TV shows and Radio programming:

The Priests and Pastoral Associates of Priests for Life are on 1360 AM, WWOW (Walking on Water Radio), Conneaut, OH from 8:10-8:20am every Thursday on the Pro-Life Thursday Catholic Morning Show. Listen live and find archived shows at http://home.1360wwow.com.

Hear us on EWTN radio on Catholic Connection with Teresa Tomeo. Fr. Frank Pavone is her guest every Wednesday at 9:30am ET and Janet Morana is her guest every Friday at 9:10am ET. For radio station information and to listen to the live show on the internet, go to www.avemariaradio.net.

Defending Life: Watch on EWTN every Friday at 10pm ET and Saturday at 2:30am ET. Listen on EWTN radio every Friday at 1am ET, Saturday at 6:30pm ET and Sunday at 5am ET. For more information or to listen online go to www.ewtn.com.

January 2-4: Spirituality of Being Pro-Life, Part 2. Involvement in the pro-life movement is shaped by particular virtues and characteristics. Fr. Frank describes this spirituality, in which he has trained thousands of priests, deacons, seminarians, and lay activists over the years and around the world.

Gospel of Life: The shows air on "Angel Two" Channel 102 on Sky Angel IPTV and channel 266 on Dish Network every Friday at 8:30am and Sunday at 9am. It also airs on Catholic Familyland (www.familyland.tv) - Sunday at 1am, Monday at 9am, Wednesday at 3:30am and Thursday at 11:30 pm. (All Times Eastern). Listen to Gospel of Life episodes online at www.gospeloflife.com.

Week of December 28: Theology Becomes Biography

Please tune in and spread the word! In fact, you can help us - and your whole parish - by asking your pastor to place in the parish bulletin an announcement about our TV shows. Thanks in advance!

Blessings and prayers,

Fr. Frank Pavone

National Director, Priests for Life