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Pro-Life Training Program Series

Pro-Lifers Must Focus Efforts

By Janet Baker
Treasurer, Pro-Life Maryland, Inc.

The eighth of the “Ten Principles of the Offensive” is to concentrate superior power at the decisive time and place.  This involves the effective combination of physical and intangible assets and means to wage war.  For us, our intangibles must include superior leadership, better planning, better tactical skill, morale and esprit de corps, and faith in God.

Most of our key victories came about because pro-lifers found critical weaknesses in anti-life operations and exploited them with intelligence and hard work.  They brought their talents and resources to bear on the most vital points while cooperating with others.  As we know, such opportunities don’t often occur; thus, when they do, we must be willing to work in an intense and disciplined fashion.

One familiar way in which abortion advocates will try to have us dissipate, rather than concentrate, our energies is through the misguided “seamless garment” theory.  They will tell us that we aren’t pro-life unless we oppose capital punishment, work to end poverty, etc.

These certainly are worthy causes; however, they do not attain to the priority rightly given to abortion in terms of Catholic moral teaching.

Many Catholics feel that we have to “prove” that we are truly pro-life according to this faulty criterion.  In so doing, they allow proponents of death to define what it is to be pro-life, which is pure folly.  In a very real sense, we simply need to turn a deaf ear to those shrill, disingenuous criticisms and realize that it is Our Lord and the Magisterium that define who we are, not the denizens of the Culture of Death.