By Dave Andrusko
At the end of the month my wife and I and one of our adult children will be making our annual trek back home to Minnesota. As a native Minnesotan, we faithfully read the newspaper of Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL)—National Right to Life’s state affiliate.
The latest edition has a great story about their summer camps which you can read at NRL News Today. In the near future there will soon be a story about how volunteers share messages of life at the Minnesota State Fair.
If you’re not from the Midwest you may not appreciate what a part of the fabric of life state fairs are. We’ve only been able to attend three since we left Minnesota, but we’re going to make a point of getting there this month.
In anticipation of the new story, let me quote three paragraphs from one of MCCL’s prior stories and then briefly reinforce what’s said.
The State Fair has become an extremely effective venue for spreading the pro-life message. MCCL has presented a pro-life educational booth at the annual event in St. Paul for more than three decades. With attendance of more than 1.7 million people, the fair is a tremendous opportunity to share the message of life with Minnesotans from across the state.
MCCL’s life-size fetal models draw countless numbers of people. Children and adults are fascinated by the beautiful little babies, and many are surprised to learn how lifelike and human they appear even at the earliest stages of development.
“The fetal models dispel the false claims of the abortion industry that unborn babies are nothing but blobs of tissue.”
The last volunteer opportunity my wife Lisa and I had back in Minnesota was working at the MCCL booth at the State Fair. I remember how young children would approach us and then stop, frozen in their tracks, like it was yesterday.
They would look at the fetal models, ask if they could pick them up, and then be mesmerized as they unwittingly absorbed two inter-related foundational truths: this is how every one of us looked at that stage of our development and that there is a continuum of life. We are no more, nor any less, human at a given point in fetal development.
We can’t wait to get to the Minnesota State Fair.