“I went to pro-life events starting in the late seventies and it was the late -eighties before I ran into more than occasional non-Catholic at such an event....”
And then on with the rest of this paragraph in your post.
My family joined with many other Catholic families from all over our diocese to work very hard for the pro-life cause after Roe V. Wade came into law in 1971.
Not only were we subjected to ugliness and outright vitriol by the pro-choice groups, but—like you say in your post-—we also ran into anti-Catholic groups who joined in with the pro-choice people in their vitriolic “lies and propaganda” and used our work and rallies and efforts as a springboard to vilify us.
It was well over a decade before the non-Catholic Christians came aboard and begin to join in the pro-life work. They were, without a doubt, welcomed to the effort.
As an interesting sidenote: Bernard Nathanson, the leading icon for abortion in the 70’s, actually converted to the Catholic Church and died a Catholic. I was able to have a good conversation with him in the time after his baptism.
“The man who is in Christ Jesus is a new creation” St. Paul
PS about Bernard Nathanson: the process of his conversion began when he was invited to a Pro-Life gathering (by Catholic pro-lifers) in Washington, DC when they had a big convocation there. He actually accepted. The rest is history.