Obama Invited to the March for Life

Obama Invited to the March for Life

By Thaddeus M. Baklinski

WASHINGTON, DC, January 22, 2009 (LifeSIteNews.com) - A letter delivered to President-Elect Obama on January 15 from president of the March for Life, Nellie Grey, and the March for Life Fund Board of Directors, invited the President to speak to the assembled throngs at the 36th annual March for Life Rally today. But with the participants of the March already making their way through the streets of Washington or completing the March route, following the early afternoon speeches, it seems that the president has declined the invitation.

Explaining the reason for the invitation, the letter stated: "America needs your strong leadership as President of all of the people to stop the intentional killing of an estimated 3,000 preborn boys and girls each day and the brutalizing of mind, heart and body of pregnant mothers.

"This evil continues because some public officials and other citizens are indifferent to the fatal errors of Roe v. Wade and the critical need to overturn the illicit Roe v. Wade.

"So, on January 22, 2009, we prolifers will again peacefully March for Life in our Nation’s capital.”

The conclusion of the invitation again asks the President to participate: "As President of all the people, please join us prolifers as we March for Life for love of God, of our born and preborn Neighbors, including abortionists, and of our Country."

With this year's attendance at the March for Life expected to surpass last year's staggering 225,000, the event organizers were hopeful that President Obama would follow the example of President Bush, who was accustomed to speak to the March for Life rally via telephone to express his support.

In an interview with LifeSiteNews during the preparation for this year's March for Life, Nellie Grey discussed the effort to show the true face of abortion to a president who promises to abolish all legal abortion restrictions through the infamous Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA).

"We will ask him," Grey said, "Have you seen an abortion? Have you seen a child who has been subjected to abortion?" Gray pointed out that she would also want the new President to know "that on the day of his inauguration, an estimated 3,000 children will be killed and the body and mind of their mothers will be traumatized that day."

Asked what she would want Obama's first impression to be of the pro-life movement in America, Gray told LSN, "I definitely want him (Obama) to see that Americans ... are telling him that this is our country, and our country does not kill innocent human beings. And now we are at the point of killing 50 million innocent human beings - that's genocide. The reason for the March for Life is to assure that in history no one will be able to say, 'Why didn't those people stand up and do something?'"
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Link to March for Life invitation to President Obama: http://www.marchforlife.org/content/view/38/

Invitation to President-Elect Obama Print E-mail
President-Elect Barack Obama

The White House

Washington, DC January 15, 2009

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

I am pleased to extend this invitation from the March for Life Fund Board of Directors and from thousands of prolife Americans as we look forward to the memorable occasion of your inauguration. We request that you come to speak to us at the 36th annual March for Life Rally on Thursday, Noon, January 22, 2009 at the Mall and 4th Street NW. Why? Because America needs your strong leadership as President of all of the people to stop the intentional killing of an estimated 3,000 preborn boys and girls each day and the brutalizing of mind, heart and body of pregnant mothers. This evil continues because some public officials and other citizens are indifferent to the fatal errors of Roe v. Wade and the critical need to overturn the illicit Roe v. Wade. So, on January 22, 2009, we prolifers will again peacefully March for Life in our Nation’s capital with the theme: "REMEMBER — The Life Principles mean ‘Equal Care’ with No Exception!"

What Are the Life Principles? The March for Life drew up and adopted the principles in 1974 as a positive response to Roe v. Wade errors. The Life Principles are summarized immediately below. They focus on the fact that each human life begins at fertilization, and society must provide equal care for the right to life of each born and preborn human. The Life Principles are based on law of God and Man: Thou Shalt Not Kill, and begin with a sentence adapted from our Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all human beings are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which is the right to life . . .."

The Life Principles then set the duty of every human in society and of society as a whole to preserve and protect the right to life from each human’s beginning at fertilization and throughout the natural continuum of life without regard to age, health, or condition of dependency.

The Life Principles conclude with an equal care provision: "When two or more human beings are in a situation in which their lives are mutually endangered, all available ordinary means and reasonable efforts shall be used to preserve and to protect the life of each and every human so endangered."

We know that a doctor may not be able to save the life of each patient. An innocent human may die, but must never be killed. Thus, rather than using an "exception clause" to try to authorize anyone intentionally to kill an innocent preborn, America must provide equal care for both a pregnant mother and her preborn child.

No Exception! No Compromise! What does this mean? It means that a government or a person does not own the unalienable right to life of another human, and does not have capacity to authorize anyone intentionally to kill an innocent human with impunity. We can correct Roe v. Wade errors with education focused on 1) the fact that a human is in existence at fertilization, and 2) society’s duty is to provide equal care for both a pregnant mother and her preborn child. This theme calls each American – prolife and pro-abortion alike – to free ourselves from the evils of abortion. Moral and civil laws are based on sanctity of human life and command each human not to shed innocent blood.
Each American has a personal duty to God, Self, Neighbor and Country to defend by word and deed against abortion evils, because it is the inescapable right thing to do.

History tells us that this duty to protect the right to life of each human in existence at fertilization was not always carried out as it should have been. Our own country suffers the evils of slavery, the Nazi era, and more. Both church and state officials often apologize today for past errors when heinous things were done and when necessary proper things were not done. Abortion evil in America is error which officials and citizenry of both church and state have a duty to stop and can unite to stop. The dreadful killing goes on because abortionists and media keep the innocent blood of preborns out-of-sight, which keeps many Americans so passive to the evil of killing that they tolerate or even support a choice to murder preborns. Killing innocents is a crime against humanity as we learn from principles used by Americans in judging at the Nuremberg Trials. There is no common ground or "moderate" position between "to kill or not to kill."
It is an anomaly for an American to enjoy personal civil rights and then participate directly or indirectly in the intentional killing of even one preborn human – or, for public and private officials to favor legislation, persons, or positions which make exceptions to the Life Principles and approve of murdering a preborn human with impunity. Americans must not shirk their duty to protect preborns today and force Americans to apologize tomorrow for the massacre of innocents which we can stop today. The offense of innocent blood wreaks havoc on the moral, political, economic and social fiber of both individual citizens and our country. By abortion, a pregnant mother is hurt and a preborn is a torn-apart corpse. Each prolifer is repulsed that America tolerates this home-grown violence to humans. It is equally as heinous intentionally to kill a tiny preborn human at fertilization as to kill a larger preborn or an innocent born human.

Mr. Obama, we hear about genocide in far-off lands, and America is asked to help stop that evil. Certainly America wants to help stop all genocide evil – foreign and domestic. Since the illicit Roe v. Wade, America suffers genocide of an estimated 50,000,000 preborn boys and girls. And, since the March for Life Rally last year, an estimated 1,300,000 preborn humans have been intentionally killed out-of-sight – without coverage by media or a celebrity. An abortion killing site is within walking distance of the White House. As President of all the people, please join us prolifers as we March for Life for love of God, of our born and preborn Neighbors, including abortionists, and of our Country.

Sincerely in Life,

Miss Nellie J. Gray, President

Baby Born Alive And Killed After Botched Abortion

Baby Born Alive And Killed After Botched Abortion Laid to Rest in Miami

Thomas More Society Seeks Justice for Baby Shanice

Shanice Denise Osbourne was laid to rest this week, nearly 27 months after she was killed following a botched abortion. She was stuffed into a medical waste bag filled with chlorine bleach just after she was delivered alive by abortion clinic owner Belkis Gozalez in Hialeah, Fla. While the Miami-Dade County district attorney vacillated, the Thomas More Society intervened to seek justice for Baby Shanice.

So far, a Thomas More Society investigator has surfaced essential facts and witnesses, consulted with police, and prodded prosecutors. An expert pathologist, retained by the Thomas More Society, found that A Gyn Diagnostics' unlicensed staff played a causative role in the infant's death. Now, the Thomas More Society has retained Tom Pennekamp, Esq., a former president of the Dade County Bar Association and an expert in major personal injury cases, as its co-counsel for the purpose of bringing a lawsuit for "wrongful death" of Baby Shanice.

For more information about this shocking case, read the press release, along with articles from World Net Daily, LifeNews, and LifeSiteNews.

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