Jakki Jeffs,
on the pro-life challenge:
As pro-lifers, we’re behind the rock, and we think we have to move the rock … but our job is to be faithful, to get out there … and together, we’re all there behind that rock, and one of these days God is going to come and say, ‘Faithful servant, let Me do the job.’
Merle Terlesky,
on being a former pro-abortion activist:
To everyone who came in contact with me, [I had] an anger and a hatred that cannot be described as anything short of demonic, because I had no reason to dislike [pro-life] people … And it’s true no matter what we did, no matter how we blasphemed your faith, no matter how many times we blew up condoms and threw them in the air, no matter how many times we made fun of the Sisters in Christ, no matter no many times we did all these things, we could not break your determination.
Jim Hughes,
on the role of the pro-life movement:
We [pro-lifers] are the lighthouse. We are not the Canadian Alliance, we are not the Liberal Party, we are not the Conservative Party or the FCP or the CHP, or the NDP or whatever; we are the movement – and we’re not moving. And we’re not moving because we’re on God’s side, and He didn’t drop down out of a cloud recently and give any of us permission to sacrifice any of His babies in order to get a party elected.
Laurie Velker,
on the call to life-affirming ministry:
I venture to say that Satan, the Evil One, can’t get to God, so he unleashes his vengeance to destroy God through the destruction of His greatest creation, human life, the image bearers of God. In many abortion-minded cases throughout the world, there is a fearful, hurting woman who needs to hear the truth about life – the sanctity of human life as well as eternal life.
Michael Coren,
on media manipulation:
What we all have to face is the culture … but the culture is something which is totally contrary to our mindset in this point of its evolution. It’s a culture based on things that are profoundly anti-life – kill them before they’re born, kill them when they’re old, have loveless sex whenever and wherever, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone, and if it does, blame the church, blame the state, blame your mom and dad, and go on a chat show and tell everybody about it.
What’s important though is not so much the darkness out there, but the light within us and what we do to fight against it … We will win, because in every sense of the phrase, we cannot lose.
We have to present the most attractive, reasonable face of the pro-life movement possible … We’re moral, we’re noble, but we’ve got to try and convince people …. Too often we make people feel less than comfortable [about] our position.
John Shea,
on stem cell research:
This research resulted in the death of human embryos every single time an experiment was done. All biological textbooks agree, as distinct from medical textbooks, that a human being is conceived once a human sperm fertilizes a human ovum. That biological fact applies to all organisms which are reproduced sexually …
Clearly all such stem cell research is morally wrong. It fails to respect the life and dignity of the unborn child, and the dignity of marriage. Human embryos should not be treated like lab rats. There is little doubt the researchers had good ends in mind; however good ends do not justify evil means.
Charles Rice,
on law and politics:
We have accepted the idea that the intentional infliction of death is a problem-solving technique and that is true on many issues … We are dealing with a diabolic culture … The culture of death is the result of the Enlightenment philosophy of the last three centuries where the philosophers and the politicians tried to organize life as if God does not exist.
What’s happening here is that the abortion of the future is going to be chemical or by device … We’ve got to push for no-compromise laws that say this is a human being and you can’t kill a human being. Don’t expect to get them enacted, but that doesn’t mean you play games with it and trim the sails and compromise, because then you are losing your main project which is education and conversion. And you can only do that by telling the truth.
Peter Kreeft,
on virtue, truth, and relativism:
A community’s longevity is proportionate to its morality- and to its religion, for no society has successfully existed that has built its knowledge of morality on any other basis than religion … It is a massive and obvious fact of human history that religion has always been the primary source of mankind’s knowledge of morality.
Western civilization seems to have contracted moral AIDS … The main source of the murder of morality is our moralists, our mind-molders, our educators, both formal – in schools and universities – and informal – in media.
Joe Scheidler,
on the spiritual roots of the pro-life movement:
This is what has happened to so many of our institutions, even our churches. There is corruption within, with a veneer of gentility and truth, so we’ve got a real battle on our hands.
Tom Wappel,
on the political realm:
Just because he [Jean Chretien] says something, does not make it the policy of our party. The policy of our party always has been and still is, as far as I’m concerned, and this has never been denied to me, that on the issue of abortion, we will have a free vote if it comes up. It is certainly clear that no abortion policy will come from the Liberal government, but there will be no attempt to coerce the consciences of individual Members of Parliament … There is no formal policy in the Liberal Party of Canada making the Liberal Party pro-abortion.
Adrian Dieleman,
on the disabled and life:
My disability has given me a platform to reach out to others in a lot of different ways … Somehow God’s love extends to those on the other end of the pro-life spectrum. Perhaps they don’t see as clearly. They are the ones who are killing the babies. They are the ones telling the disabled if you don’t want to live, just end your life. So we have a big responsibility to pray for them, to let them know about God’s forgiveness.
Peter Kreeft,
on how God is not mocked:
We will win the fight against the culture of death for three reasons: one of them is that love is the nature of reality, love is stronger than hate … The second reason is because truth is stronger than falsehood. Light is stronger than darkness. Whenever light shines into darkness, the darkness cannot comprehend it … And above all, because Jesus Christ is Lord. Christ is King – this is not a mythic image from a primitive, patriarchal politics.
Anna Halpine,
on the United Nations:
What we [the World Youth Alliance] hadn’t realized when we made our stand, essentially on a basis of conscience, was that the UN has an increasingly active agenda focusing on young people, that there are increasing amounts of funds which are being directed for the promotion of educational and sex-ed programs for young people, and that these [developing] nations were in a position where they not only now had to resist all of the power and money of the developed nations, but they now were placed in a position where they were supposed to be resisting the world’s youth.
[The World Youth Alliance and its supporters] are no longer willing to accept this very radical and very feminist agenda to promote and force on their countries abortion on demand, homosexual rights and other policies, especially geared towards children in terms of sex-ed, a lack of parental rights, which they have seen in the West are destroying the fabric of our society.
Gregg Cunningham,
on the Genocide Awareness Project:
People have got to be convinced that a first-trimester baby is as fully entitled to rights of personhood, as second- and third-trimester [babies] are, and they’ve got to be convinced that a suction abortion … is as horrifying an act of violence as a partial-birth abortion.
There are principles to successful social reform that link virtually every successful social reform campaign in the last century-and-a-half, and they begin with the reformers’ heavy reliance on horrifying pictures to dramatize injustice that the culture is ignoring … The culture never wants to know about injustice, especially if the culture is complicit in the injustice, or complacent in the face of the injustice.
All the education activity that the pro-life movement contemplates and undertakes is less effective than we would like it to be because it’s got to overcome denial … Denial means they don’t want to know it. So the problem we face becomes, “How do you educate people who don’t want to know?”
Nothing kills social reform more quickly than a culture that is ignoring injustice, and when they don’t ignore it, they trivialize it, and that’s what’s happening with abortion … So it falls to the reformers to force key facts into the heads of people who don’t want those facts in their heads. That’s where pictures have unimaginable power.
I wish we had kids in America who are as heroic as the kids at UBC (University of British Columbia) … Nothing terrifies pro-aborts to the point of hysteria like these (GAP) photographs.
People say to me, “This picture stuff is a bad idea, because it just turns people off.” And they are half right. It does turn people off. But it doesn’t just turn people off. People get over the anger, but they don’t get over the pictures.
Quotes compiled by Mike Mastromatteo
