Pro-life win against censorship!

Steve Macias, the west coast coordinator of Students for Life of America (and a personal friend), was standing on public property outside a high school. He was passing out a brochure about fetal development, abortion, and how to take a stand against injustice. One of the twelve pages contained graphic images of aborted babies, while others were devoted to images of slavery and genocide; the cover stated “Warning! Disturbing photos of injustice inside.”

One of the biggest arguments against pro-lifers using graphic images is that children might see them. For younger children, I’m ambivalent, but high schoolers are unquestionably old enough to process the information and make up their own minds. According to the Guttmacher Institute, nearly one fifth of abortions in the United States are done on teenagers. Surely, if someone is old enough to have an abortion, she is old enough to see an abortion! It is critical to reach high schoolers with the facts about human development, before they find themselves facing unplanned pregnancies.

A school administrator stood beside Steve and his companions, threatening them with arrest and snatching brochures from the students’ hands. But this story has a happy ending:

The panic that the administrator had communicated [in her 911 call] sent a half dozen police cars speeding to the campus and toward the group of us handing out literature. Fortunately, the police understood the law and protected our right to stand for the preborn at this high school. So instead of arresting us as the administrator had desired, an officer actually came out to us and affirmed that what we were doing was perfectly fine.

A giant thumbs up to these police officers for doing their jobs!

Steve ends his account thusly:

This is just another example of how there is an intense battle for the mind and souls of children at publicly funded schools where the dominant secular culture is undermining the sanctity of human life. Students are under great pressure to conform to the schools’ radical, anti-life views on abortion, which are imposed on them by secular textbooks, administrators, and teachers.

Here, I must respectfully disagree with Steve. The secular human anatomy textbook is one of our best weapons in the fight for life. And for all we know, the school administrator was a pro-choice Catholic, and the police officers who stood up for Steve were humanists.

The abortion movement’s strategy, as outlined by NARAL co-founder Bernard Nathanson, is to paint opposition to abortion as a fringe religious issue. Let’s not help them.