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Schwartz Outlines Best Way To End Abortion

Michael Schwartz has been active in the pro-life movement since 1969.  But only in recent years, he says, has he realized how we can end legalized abortion in our lifetime.

“It will not end through litigation,” Mr. Schwartz told his audience at a Defend Life-sponsored talk at Immaculate Conception Church in Towson February 18.

Schwartz, who is vice-president and Capitol Hill lobbyist for Concerned Women for America, pointed out that it doesn’t matter what legal arguments you make, the Supreme Court justices aren’t going to change their minds.

And even if they did, “It would be a great setback for us,” he asserted, because it would re-energize a dying pro-abortion movement.  

It was not a great move for the temperance movement to get prohibition enacted in 1920; that merely launched a decade of intemperance, he said.

“Merely changing the law without changing the hearts of our countrymen will result in defeat.  What we have to do is convert our fellow Americans.”

While a small minority of Americans are either strongly pro-life or strongly pro-abortion, two-thirds are in the middle, with conflicting feelings over the issue, said Schwartz.

Polls show that they believe abortion is the killing of a human.  “But they believe that it is a necessary evil; somehow, women need this option available, in order to be free,” he said.

We will not be able to sustain pro-life laws until we have a pro-life public, he said:  “Once people come to the conclusion that abortion is bad for women, then they will be with us.”

But with 100,000 abortions each month, abortion is the most common surgical procedure in the U.S.  

You can’t pass a law and put a billion-dollar industry out of business, Schwartz explained:  “We have laws against pornography and drugs, but they are billion-dollar industries.  As long as they are, they’re not going to stop.”

The abortion industry is declining; since the 1990s, the number of reported abortions has declined about 20 percent.  The number of abortion facilities has also dropped during that period from over 2,000 to less than a thousand.

Schwartz believes we can reduce those numbers to insignificance by, ironically, giving women a real choice, rather than the often nonexistent “choice” touted by pro-abortionists.

He praised the 3,000 pregnancy resource centers in the country.

“Women who have had abortions invariably say they had no other choice; the pregnancy resource centers have given them the help and love they need,” he said.

Abortion is what happens when women run out of choices:  “That’s why the abortion industry fights so hard against parental involvement and a simple waiting period.”

The public also needs to know the truth about so-called “safe” legal abortions and the kind of people who are performing them, said Schwartz.

He detailed the cases of five women who died from abortions performed in Maryland.

“The malpractice in these cases is breathtakingly awful,” he said.  “Yet, every one of the abortionists I have mentioned is still allowed to practice in Maryland.

“Check out your neighborhood abortionist,” Schwartz urged.  “Know what their record is and let the public know--and their image of abortion will change.”

A related scandal in the abortion industry is the lack of health and safety regulations, said Schwartz.

Veterinary clinics have minimal standards, but Maryland’s abortion mills have no regulations.

“We care about our puppies!  Why don’t we care about our daughters?” he said.

“If you institute minimum standards of safety and health in these so-called health clinics, you drive their profit margin down.  And you know what?  They go out of business.”

Abortionists also fight “tooth and nail” against having to report sexual abuse of minors, he said.  He recounted a case reported in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1990 of a Baltimore family in which the father had repeatedly impregnated his three young daughters, whom their mother had taken to abortion mills for a total of 10 abortions.

“I’m sure there isn’t any abortion facility in this state that will report cases of statutory rape,” said Schwartz.

By loving and helping women in trouble, and by putting abortionists out of business through legal means and prayer, he said, “I don’t care who is on the Supreme Court, we will have a consensus for human life, and our laws will reflect that.”