Grassroots pro-life success

I like my headline better than the one on this story. If you go through it, read “pro-lifers” in all the places it refers to “abortion opponents”. That language tweak was a major liberal media tactic to cue readers’ sentiments against those who work to protect life, and in favor of those who work to protect abortion.

But no language tweaking can mask the news here that at the grassroots level, the pro-life movement is gaining great momentum from each successive victory in its campaign to give women information and…thus…be known as the true advocates for women’s rights.

The S.C. House’s landslide passage of an ultrasound abortion bill, which kindled a firestorm of attention and controversy, was sealed weeks before the House voted.

The turning point came when a leading group opposed to abortions, the Palmetto Family Council, was given a treasure trove of telephone numbers and e-mail addresses for S.C. abortion opponents. The new contacts far exceeded the group’s existing grass-roots network.

The national conservative organization Focus on the Family had the information and agreed to share it with the Palmetto Family Council.

The data allowed the S.C. council to spur local abortion opponents to contact their lawmakers in greater numbers than before.

That effort paid off.

Lawmakers said they received dozens of calls and messages from their constituents. All had the same plea: Adopt H. 3355.

“That was very dramatically different than what we were able to do in the past,” said Oran Smith, president of the Palmetto Family Council.

The groundwork that led to 91 votes for the abortion ultrasound bill March 21 began months earlier, in a quieter fashion.

Americans United for Life, a Chicago-based law firm that promotes abortion restrictions in states, issued a policy report on ultrasounds as a method for reducing abortions. The group believes a woman who views an ultrasound of her fetus is more likely to reconsider her decision to have an abortion.

Smith and then-House candidate Mick Mulvaney of Lancaster County began to work on the bill’s concept.

The final impetus, Smith said, was a visit in early January from his 25-year-old research director, Marie Connelly, who approached him with a story and a manila envelope.

Connelly had an abortion five years ago, Smith said. An ultrasound had been performed, as state health regulations required.

“But she’d never been offered a chance to see it,” Smith said. Connelly said that when she went into the abortion clinic, “she was still undecided, but everything happened so fast.”

In the manila envelope was the ultrasound image of Connelly’s fetus.

“It changed me,” Smith said. “It changed everyone associated with it.”

Connelly’s story was quoted in a story by The Associated Press that appeared in more than 100 newspapers worldwide, Smith said.

From there, the story went national.

ABC World News Tonight, MSBNC, CNN and “Good Morning America” did stories about the S.C. bill, the first of its kind in the nation.

Nine other states require doctors to offer ultrasound images to a woman before an abortion. However, the S.C. bill is the first in the nation that would require the doctor to review the ultrasound with the woman.

This is the frontline of the abortion battles now, the emergence of crisis pregnancy centers as the best protectors of women and their rights, and the swell of grassroots activism. What you do, folks, matters. Especially when enough folks do the same thing at the same time. And then pass the word to more folks…