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The Rescue Movement was a PR disaster simply because the Internet/Fox News/and Talk Radio was virtually nonexistent. The mainstream media maligned OR every chance it could get. However, it did not set the Pro Life Movement back 10 years, it WAS the pro life movement for many years. I believe it served as a sort of boot camp for rescuers and they were given a glimpse of the evil that exists on the other side. The most organized and influential political arm of the pro life movement here in Philly was founded by two veterans of OR.

Cpforlife.org is right to blame church leaders. Bishop Austin Vaughan and Fr. Norm Weslin at least tried to do something. Rescues did save many babies and they would have changed many more hearts if the truth could have gotten past the liberal media.

Although I was never arrested, I supported the Rescue Movement financially and prayerfully for many years. Joan Andrews slept on my floor back in the 80's. She refused to take a bed, although we had many available. She had a childlike simplicity that was as frustrating as it was admirable. I don't know if marriage and family has changed that about her.

Cpforlife.org is right to blame church leaders.>>>

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I am sorry to disagree with you. I know many fine, devoutly religious people(some of whom were Catholic,one of whom received a medal from Cardinal Bevilacqua (Sp?)for her work on behalf of the unborn) with whom I became acquainted through work in the pro-life movement, who were as opposed to Operation Rescue as I was. It divided the movement in half. One of the leaders in the pro-life movement who was active long before operation rescue (I met her in my college years) said to me just recently, when one of the leaders in Operation Rescue started talking about "dying in the streets" they lost me completely.

The operation rescue folks became the focus of the cause, not the babies they were attempting to save. All the time, energy and money spent getting them out of jail, going to court, saving their homes and their jobs. And for all the investment, how did it advance the cause? What legislative gains were made? Are babies in the womb any safer?

For ten years (or was it longer?) no protests, even of the normal kind, could be held at the clinics. And the pro-life movement lost all its momentum.

It was a PR nightmare because it was a PR nightmare. Their movement not only repulsed the general public, but also repulsed genuinely pro-life people who had been working on behalf of the unborn for a long time, many of whom are still involved. They turned people off in droves, myself included. And God forbid, if you questioned their strategy.

I have never met a group of people who were more politically tone deaf or totally devoid of any sense of political strategy or political reality. For instance, there is at least one occasion I can think of (and there are probably more) in which operation rescue ran one of their own members in a major election against a Republican candidates who had a pro-life voting record close to 100 percent. You can guess how it ended, both pro-life candidates lost and the pro-choice democrat won.

Though some of their leaders, such as Randall Terry, seemed to lavish the limelight, I do not doubt their good intentions, even though they doubted the good intentions of those in the pro-life movement who disagreed with them. Likewise, as full of good intentions as they might have been, they were and still are, as equally devoid of wisdom. They took many of the grassroots members down a most destructive path.