Posted on 01/21/2006 6:35:56 PM PST by CounterCounterCulture
By Katherine Corcoran
San Jose Mercury News
Thousands of peaceful demonstrators marched down the Embarcadero to protest abortion Saturday in an event that organizers said put a mainstream face on what's often cast as an extremist position.
The rally, the second annual Walk for Life West Coast, is one of many planned nationwide to mark Sunday's 33rd anniversary of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion. The West Coast walk featured speakers from Democrats for Life and Feminists for Life employing such classic liberal watchwords as housing, education and child care to make the case against abortion, saying more social programs will result in fewer women terminating pregnancies.
(snip)
A smaller but louder group of pro-choice demonstrators clustered along the march route between Justin Herman Plaza at the San Francisco Ferry Building and Marina Green, drumming, waving signs and shouting ``Bush and fascists, get out of town,'' and ``If you don't like abortion, don't have one.''
(snip)
Walk for Life marchers said the turnout, estimated at nearly the double the 5,000 who came last year, shows widespread support for abolishing abortion -- even in the Bay Area.
People on both sides of the issue heeded calls to keep the demonstrations peaceful. San Francisco police reported no incidents of trouble. {OOPS, NOT TRUE}
more... http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/13681592.htm
Saturday, January 21, 2006
(01-21) 12:20 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- Dueling demonstrations over abortion rights began this morning with thousands of activists on different sides of the issue facing off on San Francisco's waterfront.
The confrontation is certain to continue well into the afternoon.
Abortion opponents gathered in Justin Herman Plaza for the second annual Walk For Life West Coast, an event that drew anti-abortion activists from all over the state.
After rallying all morning, they started their march at about 11:45 a.m. down the Embarcadero and along the waterfront with a goal of arriving at the Marina Green.
A vocal group of abortion rights advocates assembled nearby with plans to break up the rally. They vowed to use acts of civil disobedience to try and divert the march, and to line the route, chanting abortion rights slogans and performing street theater.
more...
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/21/MNGUCGR3HF5.DTL
``They can put a nice face on it, but their ideology is about violence,'' said Nancy Kato of Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights. ``They're taking away women's rights. They're taking away civil liberties.''
LOL! For every wacko in the pro-life cause that kills or maims an abortion butcher, there are at least 10 abortion butchers who kill tens of thousands in the cause of a career. Who's more violent?
Light always wins over darkness, but darkness can never win over light.
The liberals are pushing hard to have their will be done, but what they're doing is building up inertia. Where there is force, there is opposing force building up against it.
We shall see if Mayor Face Time can resist the urge to comment before the cameras, klieg lights and popping flashbulbs.
Indeed. And there is not ONE single women's right or civil liberty we're taking away.
We are clearly EXTENDING civil rights to those who had lost them with a couple of evil Supreme Court dictates.
Indeed. It's not like he has to be in a hurry to get home to the wife anymore. ;-)
"Abortion rights have been slowly whittled away while we haven't even been looking," said Kitty Striker, 22, who decorated her hair with small coat hanger replicas for Saturday's counter-protest. "That's what's so shocking and so scary to me."
These people are ghouls. It's sad.
Contact: Kelly Connelly, Walk For Life West Coast
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 21 /Christian Wire Service/ -- Fifteen thousand pro-life supporters filled the streets along San Francisco’s waterfront for more than a mile, walking behind a banner that proclaimed “Abortion Hurts Women.”
The turnout for the second annual Walk for Life West Coast was double last year’s, despite a day that dawned rainy and cloudy.
“We’re obviously building momentum,” said organizer Dolores Meehan, in reference to the police crowd count. “It’s not just an event, it’s a movement.”
While last year’s Walk was marred by about 1,000 angry pro-abortion counter-demonstrators who spit and threw eggs and condoms, this year saw just a few hundred lining the sidewalks and chanting. Walk for Life participants were asked to avoid all interaction with the pro-abortion demonstrators, and did, walking quietly. In contrast to the initial 2005 Walk, which drew denunciations from San Francisco’s mayor and board of supervisors, the mayor and most supervisors ignored the event. Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice California, in contrast to last year, did not organize counter demonstrations.
The 2 ½-mile trek is an outreach to women who have had abortions or who need help with their pregnancies, and has adopted the slogan of Feminists for Life of America, “Women Deserve Better than Abortion.”
FFL President Serrin M. Foster, African American Baptist minister Clenard Childress, political activist and columnist Star Parker, Hispanic community representative Alfredo Abarca and Carol Crossed of Democrats for Life spoke at the rally which preceded the 12 noon Walk.
All the speakers urged support for pregnant and parenting women, from babysitting to volunteering at crisis pregnancy centers.
Parker, a former welfare mom who had four abortions before turning her life around, said change is on the way. Benjamin Franklin walked into the Constitutional Congress and said, “It may be legal but it’s not lawful to own another man.” Today, Parker said, “we stand again and say it may be legal but it is not lawful that we go into the womb…we reach up into that mother’s womb and we destroy that life. This will not go on forever!”
Foster told a crowd filled with college and high school students, that college-age women account for almost half of this country’s abortions: “We mourn with a generation which knows one-third of their peers are missing, many of them siblings.”
Childress, founder of BlackGenocide.org and North East director of Life Education and Resource Network, told the walkers that their attendance was an act of conscience in the face of legal abortion, which he called “the most unjust law in the history of mankind. That is why I lift my voice; that is why you come here, that we may put an end to the slaughter of innocents--an end to the war on the unborn.”
A true vigil involves meditation and prayer...It's pretty funny how they think they can just burn a candle and call it a vigil.
FYI
Great work, GCC! Thanks for standing up for the rights of the unborn! God bless you.
Thank you!
Did you make it out there this year?
A number that was purposely inflated and grossly distorted. Very few women had back-alley abortions, much less died from them. It just wasn't done by decent human beings, which women generally tried to be back in the Stone Age pre-1963.
Congratulations! We need more like you!
"I remember laughing when we made those slogans up," recalls Bernard Nathanson, M.D., co-founder of pro-abortion vanguard group NARAL, reminiscing about the early days of the abortion-rights movement in the late '60s and early '70s. "We were looking for some sexy, catchy slogans to capture public opinion. They were very cynical slogans then, just as all of these slogans today are very, very cynical."
... snip ...
"We (Lawrence Lader and Nathanson) persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal, enlightened, sophisticated one," recalls the movement's co-founder. "Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60 percent of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1 million.
"Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans, convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.
"Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1,500 percent since legalization."
NARAL's brilliantly deceitful marketing campaign, bolstered by fraudulent "research," was uncannily successful. In New York, the law outlawing abortion had been on the books for 140 years. "In two years of work, we at NARAL struck that law down," says Nathanson. "We lobbied the legislature, we captured the media, we spent money on public relations ... Our first year's budget was $7,500. Of that, $5,000 was allotted to a public relations firm to persuade the media of the correctness of our position. That was in 1969."
I'm afraid not. I've been too insanely busy with work this month to be able to pull myself away even for the day. I really hated to miss out, but am glad to see it went well. My thoughts, prayers and gratitude were with all of you who were able to go out there this year.
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