Greg DalyFor congressman Chris Smith, who has represented New Jersey in the US House of Representatives since 1981, opposition to abortion rests on the same principles as his roles as co-chairman of the Coalition for Autism Research and Education and of the bipartisan Congressional Alzheimer’s Task Force.
“To me it comes from the same impulse,” he told The Irish Catholic. “It’s about helping people who are sick, disenfranchised, disabled and it’s the same identical commitment that we all have as Christians and Catholics towards the least of our brethren.”
Mr Smith was keynote speaker at the Pro Life Campaign’s annual conference last weekend, addressing a crowd of more than 500 people in the RDS. A major figure in the campaign to bring to light the practices of Planned Parenthood, he says the American media’s failure to cover properly a succession of videos revealing how the organs from aborted foetuses have been sold for profit “was a cover-up”, but he insists the campaign must continue.
“We’re going to keep persisting, exposing the facts, bringing legislation, holding hearings,” he says, asserting that the Planned Parenthood brand has been built on multiple lies that are currently being shredded, and maintaining, “They can only hold back the truth for so long.”
The pro-life movement is definitely changing, he thinks. Abortion has been in sharp decline across the US for some years, even in states which have not tightened their abortion laws, and young adults are repeatedly shown in polls as being far less likely to support abortion than their elders.
Feeding into this, Mr Smith thinks, is the fact that post-abortive women, enabled by such campaigns as Silent No More, are speaking out, so that “it’s becoming more and more apparent that hurting women are seeking help, and have to”. Describing them as “as pro-life, if not more so, than anyone else”, he says in the early years of the movement “none of us counted on that”.
Another important development is that young adults have grown up in a world of high-definition ultrasound images that make it impossible to maintain seriously that unborn human beings are the mere clumps of cells of pro-choice myth.
Exclaiming that he couldn’t even count how many people have shown him pictures of their unborn children, he says of the pro-life movement, “it makes sense that this is a righteous cause for women. Abortion is anti-women! More than half are girls who are killed in abortions, and it’s gotten even worse.”
Marvelling at the dedication of millennial pro-lifers, he says “they have a fervour”. Two years ago he spoke at a Students for Life conference and was amazed to see 1,800 people before him – four per college. “I was bowled over,” he says, “because they’re saving lives every day on the college campus and they’re also building a pro-life culture.”
On campus
Ireland now has its own Students for Life movement, introduced on the RDS stage by Katie Ascough, who told The Irish Catholic that “Students for Life is an idea that came up because of students needing more support in college, because it’s very difficult to have a society for students who are pro-life on campus”.
“In some universities it works,” she continues, “but in others, because the Union of Students in Ireland, which represents 354,000 students in Ireland, is openly campaigning for abortion, it’s really difficult to set up a pro-life movement.” Students for Life, she hopes, can make a real difference and help pro-life students run events even in colleges where they lack the support ordinary student societies might take for granted.
Other speakers included Prof. William Binchy, who explained the history of Ireland’s constitutional protection for the unborn, Ade Stack, who spoke about how she set up Hugh’s House, a home-from-home in Dublin for the families of seriously ill children, and Caroline Simons who spoke about the misleading arguments of those who would try to chip away at the Eighth amendment.
Prof. Binchy was unflappable when the stage was invaded by a group of pro-choice advocates who loudly announced their presence before squatting behind him for the duration of his presentation, while journalist Melanie McDonagh was disappointed they had departed the stage by the time she began to speak about freedom of speech and the importance of speaking a language everyone can understand.
Stressing that pro-life campaigners should avoid confessional language that might alienate people, she said as the law affects everyone and the protection of unborn human life is a human rights issue, it’s important to engage “with the entire body politic, not just the part of it that we agree with”.
Contesting the notion that there’s “a seamless continuity between the gay marriage issue and issues relating to abortion”, she said “one was about institutionalising a type of relationship, whether you agree with that or not, and the other is about the right to take away another human life”. As such, she said, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that many supporters of marriage redefinition would also be opposed to abortion.
“If we’re talking about a rainbow coalition,” she said, “I think this is the one that’s got the spectrum of opinion.”