National Right to Life has announced its agenda for 2012 and the national pro-life organization says its number one goal is defeating pro-abortion President Barack Obama in this November’s presidential elections.
As right-to-life activists gathered yesterday across the country to mourn the loss of more than 54 million unborn children since the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 22, 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the National Right to Life Committee said it and its 50 state affiliates share one common desire.
“It should not be a surprise to anyone that the top priority for National Right to Life’s Political Action Committee this year is defeating Barack Obama and electing a pro-life president,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “Additionally, building upon recent success in five states, National Right to Life will urge Congress to adopt a ban on aborting pain-capable unborn children in the Federal District, and will push for enactment of this ban in several more states.”
To further that goal, National Right to Life has created a super-PAC to take on Obama this year, dubbed the Victory Fund.
David O’Steen, the group’s executive director, told The Hill the PAC will focus on defeating Obama and electing a “pro-life president.”
“The challenge posed by Obama is the greatest danger we’ve ever [faced]. We see this as the greatest challenge to abortions since Roe v. Wade,” O’Steen said. He added that the PAC will support whichever of the remaining Republican candidates ultimately wins the GOP nomination, including Mitt Romney — who O’Steen says is pro-life.
“His pro-life position is not recent, and he has explained how he came to that decision when he had to approach the decision of killing human embryos for research in Massachusetts,” O’Steen said.
Apart from defeating Obama, NRLC says the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act developed by National Right to Life is a major goal — to be able to educate the public on the pain unborn children face in abortions. The language of the bill has served as a model for laws enacted so far in Nebraska, Kansas, Idaho, Alabama, and Oklahoma and the Nebraska legislation is credited with largely driving late-term abortion practitioner LeRoy Carhart from the state. [related]
Already in 2012, similar bills have been introduced in legislatures in Virginia, New Hampshire, and Florida, with additional states expected to join the list.
In states that have passed the law, the legislatures declared that there is substantial scientific evidence that the unborn child is capable of experiencing great pain during abortion procedures by 20 weeks after fertilization, and on the basis of those findings, applied general bans on abortion from that point on (i.e., from about the beginning of the sixth month, in layman’s terminology), except for rare cases in which acute physical disorders endanger the mother. No serious legal challenge has yet been mounted to any of these five laws.
Congressman Trent Franks will introduce the District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act in the U.S. House of Representatives. This bill would ban abortion of pain-capable unborn children within the nation’s capital.
“Pro-abortionists often say that limiting abortion would ‘take us backwards,’ but really, they are the ones who insist that society must remain locked in the Dark Ages of ignorance regarding the capacities of unborn children,” noted Mary Spaulding Balch, J.D., National Right to Life director of state legislation.
She continued: “Our knowledge about the capacities of the unborn child has increased by orders of magnitude since Roe v. Wade, thanks in part of 4-D ultrasound and other sophisticated imaging techniques. Our legislation also reflects what medical science has learned about the necessity for controlling the baby’s pain during open-womb fetal surgery, and when performing painful procedures on very premature newborn infants.”
“We just want to get the message out that the unborn child can feel pain,” Tobias said. “It’s a great educational tool to talk to the public, about whether they think an unborn child should be killed when it can feel pain during the procedure. We want pro-lifers to start talking about that, because we want to bring the child into this debate and put a human face on it.”
