NRTL: Why Is Abortion Still Legal?

Hear Their Cry

This weekend I received a follow-up letter from a call I received earlier from a National Right to Life soliciter. The woman who's name was Evelyn, urged me to send $100 or $200 to fight Senator Barbara Boxer's nasty Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would essentially undo all of the meager incremental victories that the pro-life movement garnered since 1973, which hasn't been a whopping amount by any means.

Partially to get her off the phone and mostly because FOCA needs to be defeated, I told her that I would take her literature and agreed to send her some smaller amount than what she had originally requested. I was wondering how much of the money would go to paying the telemarketer (80-90%?) and how much would go to actually fighting FOCA. Oh well, I guess I'm an easy touch.

Upon further refection, I decided to go ahead and send the "promised" amount. However, I also sent the following letter to voice my concerns regarding the overall work of the National Right to Life Committee.

July 7, 2008



Ms. Wanda Franz, PhD.
President
National Right to Life Committee
512 10th St.NW
Washington, DC 20004

Dear Ms. Franz:

I am sending you a check for $15.00 to fight the FOCA, because I promised to do so to your telephone solicitor and because I want to see FOCA defeated.

I am very disappointed, however, with NRTL and many other pro-life organizations, who seem much to entrenched in playing politics and making little or no progress in stopping abortion.

I learned about the upstart American RTL organization which is oing what NRTL and others should have been doing all along. They are getting things done. In the State of Colorado this fall the people will be voting on a personhood amendment. Why has the NRTL gotten behind this effort?

I am afraid that the NRTL may be too beholden to the Republican Party to be as effective as it should be. John McCain supports embryonic stem cell research and I don’t hear any condemnation of his stand on this deadly issue.

Please do not send me anymore solicitation through the mail or by telephone until you begin to take some real action on stopping bortion. Your incremental approach is not working. There must be real progress made, with or without the GOP’s backing. Seems to me all the GOP cares about is getting power. I voted for President Bush twice and what did he and a GOP controlled congress accomplish regarding abortions? Next to nothing.

Sincerely,

National Right-to-Life (NRTL) is Challenged

Hear Their Cry

Here is an interesting challenge issued by a new pro-life organization to the long-running National Right-to-Life (NRTL) organization.



$10,000 Cash Offered to National RTL from American RTL to name 'one' pro-life justice

"American Right to Life is offering attorney James Bopp $10,000 for National RTL," said the group's president Brian Rohrbough, "if he can name a single justice on the current U.S. Supreme Court who has ever written, or joined in an opinion, that the unborn child has a right to life, whether in a majority ruling or a dissent."

"In 1981, after President Ronald Reagan agreed he would sign federal personhood legislation for the unborn, National Right to Life and their longtime attorney James Bopp actually opposed that effort claiming they supported a states' rights approach," says the group's site AmericanRTL.org. "A quarter century later notice that NRTL and Bopp have long opposed all state personhood efforts."

On May 13, Colorado pro-lifers turned in 131,000 signatures exceeding by 55,000 the number needed to force a statewide vote to acknowledge in law the personhood of the unborn child.

"National Right to Life has misled the pro-life community to think that this is the wrong time to advocate personhood because we need one more Justice on the Supreme Court to have a pro-life majority," said Rohrbough. "But if we added a Justice who would uphold the right to life of the unborn, then we would have only one such Justice. The failed long-term strategy of regulating the killing of a fetus has left America without a single Justice who knows that it's wrong to kill an unborn baby; National RTL's compromise will never produce a pro-life Supreme Court."

Even Dr. James Dobson, a supporter of the failed regulation strategy admits that: "Ending partial-birth abortion... does not save a single human life." And in an article about NRTL's failed PBA ban, Notre Dame Law School's professor emeritus Charles Rice said, "Every justice now on the court accepts the Roe holding that the unborn child is a non-person... The situation remains as described by Justice John Paul Stevens in Planned Parenthood v. Casey." For Stevens had written that "the Court... rejected, the argument ‘that the fetus is a "person"'. ... there was no dissent..." And Clarence Thomas wrote in his Stenberg dissent that "a State may permit abortion," and Antonin Scalia wrote in Casey, "The states may, if they wish, permit abortion-on-demand..."

"American Right to Life will give a $10,000 cash prize to National if their general counsel James Bopp can name even a single U.S. Supreme Court Justice who has ever written or joined in any ruling or dissent advocating the personhood of the unborn," said Steve Curtis, ARTL's vice president and former chairman of the Colorado Republican Party. "To make their strategy appear successful, National Right to Life has misled the pro-life movement into believing that abortion accomplices like Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Thomas and Scalia are pro-life."

In 2002 Scalia said, "I will... strike down a law that is the opposite of Roe v. Wade. ... One wants no state to be able to prohibit abortion and the other one wants every state to have to prohibit abortion, and they're both wrong..." In 2004 Scalia claimed, "Take the abortion issue... there's something to be said for both sides." And on April 9, 2008 Scalia said, "You want the right to abortion? Create it the way most rights are created in a democracy. Persuade your fellow citizens it's a good idea - and pass a law."

"National RTL claims success in Antonin Scalia but he is not pro-life; like all the Republicans on the Court, he is a legal positivist, which is a courtroom moral relativist," Rohrbough said. "Like their Dred Scott counterpart that ruled a black man could be owned as property, the current Republican Supreme Court is wicked and will only learn about the right to life of the unborn from the advancing personhood wing of the pro-life movement."

The upstart American Right-to-Life (ARTL) was formed out of deep frustration with the NRTL. Among other things ARTL rightfully claims that the NRTL has been in bed with the GOP to the point that they have sold their souls for a bowl of porridge, for some filthy lucre. The NRTL has lost its way. The ARTL has the so-called right idea, it has been 35 years too long that we have allowed abortion to be the "law" of this land.