A national pro-life postcard
campaign aiming to override U.S. President Bill Clinton's veto of the Partial-Birth
Abortion Ban Act of 1997, HR 1122, is gaining support from the grassroots.
The 1998 Veto Override Postcard
Campaign heightens the right-to-life message, and coincides with the 25th
anniversary on January 22, 1998 of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's decision
legalizing abortion in all 50 states.
On the weekend of Jan. 24-25,
1998 parishioners of participating Catholic churches across the country
signed postcards urging senators to override President Clinton's veto.
HR 1122 bans partial-birth
abortions with a "life of the mother" exception. President Clinton vetoed
the current bill, on Oct. 10, 1997 citing, despite contrary evidence, that
the bill also should have a "health of the mother" exception. Congress
has approved HR 1122 with overwhelming bi-partisan support.
In 1998, Congress will vote
on the veto override. Only a veto override, which requires the support
of two-thirds of those present and voting in both the House of Representatives
and Senate, can stop the practice of partial-birth abortion.
Wide sponsorship
The pro-life postcard campaign
is sponsored by the National Committee for a Human Life Amendment and the
National Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities.
Each person in a participating parish receives a strip of three cards attached
to each other. The first two cards when signed are to be sent to the two
United States senators, the third is a registration card.
It is on public record that
partial-birth abortion has been performed thousands of times a year in
the United States, killing partly born children during the fifth and six
months of pregnancy and sometimes later. It has been performed mainly on
healthy babies of healthy mothers and sometimes on children with disabilities,
because parents do not desire a child born with disability.
Guided by ultrasound, an
abortionist forcibly turns the child in the womb into a breech position
and pulls the feet first, leaving the head in the birth canal. The abortionist
stabs the child at the base of the skull with sharp scissors, then widens
the hole, suctions out the child's brains with a vacuum catheter, and collapses
the head. Delivery of the dead child from the mother is then completed.
Previous pro-life postcard
campaigns in 1993, 1994, 1996 have seen about 90 per cent of Catholic dioceses
nationwide participating and a rising abortion effort stopped. Last year,
a number of individual churches from various denominations and Catholic
lay organizations, including Knights of Columbus and Catholic Daughters
of the Americas, threw in their support to override a similar bill which
President Clinton also vetoed. On their own initiative, citizens supporting
the campaign can sign postcards at any time prior to the veto override
vote.
Aside from the postcard campaign,
citizens were requested to write letters, send telegrams, make phone calls,
visit local offices, write letters to editors of local newspapers to strengthen
support for overriding the President's veto. All these supportive actions
are also aimed at educating other people on the issue.
A prayer pledge is also important,
and people are requested to say a short daily prayer for God's blessing
on the campaign and His assistance in ending partial-birth abortion.
The partial-birth abortion
procedure is never medically necessary, according to the American Medical
Association, former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, and hundreds
of individual medical authorities including obstetricians-gynecologists
and specialists in high-risk pregnancies. Legislation to outlaw the practice
has been called for by legal experts including those who identify themselves
as "pro-choice."
AMA president Daniel Johnson
Jr., M.D., stated that "the partial delivery of a living fetus for the
purpose of killing it outside the womb is ethically offensive to most Americans
and physicians. Our panel could not find any identified circumstance in
which the procedure was the only safe and effective abortion method."
The American College of Obstetricians
and Gynecologists in a statement of policy, Jan. 12, 1997, said: "A select
panel convened by ACOG could identify no circumstance under which this
procedure ... would be the only option to save the life or preserve the
health of the woman."
Clinton misled?
From former U.S. Surgeon
General C. Everett Koop, in American Medical News, August 19, 1996: "I
believe that Mr. Clinton was misled by his medical advisers on what is
fact and what is fiction in reference to late-term abortions. Because in
no way can I twist my mind to see that the late-term abortion as described
-- you know, partial birth, and then destruction of the unborn child before
the head is born -- is a medical necessity for the mother. It certainly
can't be a medical necessity for the baby."
Abortionist Warren Hern wrote
in American Medical News, November 20, 1995: "I have very serious reservations
about this procedure . . . You really can't defend it. I'm not going to
tell somebody else that they should not do this procedure. But I'm not
going to do it. . . I would dispute any statement that this is the safest
procedure to use."
Pro-lifers realize that overriding
a veto is difficult. But they emphasize that every person sending a pro-life
postcard to Congress makes a difference.
