By Dave Andrusko
NRLC President Carol Tobias
If someone is new to the Movement, they can feel like they have been dropped in the middle of something very important but about whose origins and development they know very, very little. Beginning yesterday and extending through next week, National Right to Life President and Pro-Life Perspective Host Carol Tobias will provide a tutorial that will bring the newcomer up to speed and remind some veterans of important details they may have forgotten.
Yesterday Mrs. Tobias talked about the events from 1959—the year the hugely important recommendations to change state abortion laws were issued by the American Law Institute—through Roe v. Wade, which gutted the abortion laws of all 50 states.
In today’s edition of PLP, she continues on the important theme of how the Movement began and how NRLC was created to help provide guidance, education, and coordination. Two of those early milestones were the incorporation of National Right to Life and, in 1973, the publication of the newly re-formatted National Right to Life News, which quickly became the newspaper of record for the Movement.
Mrs. Tobias offers highlights, year by year. To name just a few: In 1974 the election of pro-life Sen. Bob Dole in 1974, a Republican from Kansas, the first major statewide political battle after the Roe decision. In March of 1975, the first Human Life Amendment was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Senators James L. Buckley, from New York and Jesse Helms from North Carolina. In 1976, the life-saving Hyde Amendment was passed.
Some of the worst news came, predictably, from the Supreme Court. In Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri versus Danforth, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Missouri law that banned the use of saline amniocentesis as an abortion method and that obliged a married woman seeking an abortion to obtain her husband’s consent. On the other hand in June 1977, in Maher versus Roe and Beal versus Doe, the High Court held that federal and state governments were under no obligation to fund abortion in public assistance programs.
Be sure to go to www.prolifeperspective.com where you will hear about “Mission Possible, a project of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life. That project provided organizational development assistance and matching grant “seed” money for state right to life groups, primarily in the Southeastern United States. New state right to life groups affiliated with National Right to Life were organized in every state where one didn’t exist.
Come back tomorrow for Part Three. Please share the URL for PLP, which is www.prolifeperspective.com, using your social networks.
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