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House Speaker John Boehner
Two months after GOP House leadership unexpectedly canceled a promised vote vital to many among its pro-life base, a coalition of activist leaders is turning up the heat on Republican Speaker John Boehner over his alleged “betrayal.”
On Wednesday, March 25, at 11 a.m., a team of activists plans a sit-in protest at Sen. Boehner’s office in Washington, D.C. The event, known as #FreeTheBan, will be led by Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition; Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue; and Jill Stanek of JillStanek.com.
Boehner has said the legislation, known as the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, still “remains an important priority for our majority,” but the sit-in leaders signed a letter explaining why pro-life leaders felt “betrayed” by GOP leadership.
“This life-saving legislation [was] withdrawn on the eve of the 2015 March for Life, when hundreds of thousands of Americans had come to Washington, D.C., to embrace human rights and equality for all, and we were promised it would be passed on January 22 [the anniversary of Roe v. Wade],” the letter to Boehner states. “Just one day before scores would be marching in the harsh winter conditions of January, we were still being assured a vote would happen the next day. Imagine our further sense of betrayal that, almost two months later, no vote has been rescheduled for the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.”
“I, for the most part, kept my silence, waiting … and waiting … and waiting for the GOP House leadership to circle back and fix their mess,” Stanek elaborated in a blog post titled Why I’m protesting Speaker Boehner’s office on March 25.” “The GOP must have mistaken our silence for indifference.”
The sit-in reveals pro-life leaders aren’t willing to seem “indifferent” any longer.
Newman, for example, is telling WND the stakes are so high it’s worth the risk of civil disobedience.
“We have to implement a backbone policy for Mr. Boehner,” Newman told WND. “It means we’re serious. We’re willing to take this to another level.”
He noted it’s been 42 years since abortion was decriminalized, and Congress now has the largest pro-life majority since then.
“We expect them to act,” he said. “It’s exactly why the voters put them there. It was in their platform, what they ran on.”
Stanek, a former nurse who first rose to prominence after confronting then-Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama over baby born alive legislation, said personal experience drove her to speak up then, and it drives her now.
“For me, it always comes back to the 21-week abortion survivor I held until he died. That sweetheart would be alive today had a 20-week abortion ban been in place,” she said. “I have determined … Wednesday will be a fitting time to remind politicians, and even we in the pro-life community, about that little guy and others like him, and attempt to restore a sense of urgency on saving these babies from an agonizing, tortured death.”
As WND reported, Congress was supposed to vote earlier this year on the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would ban abortion after 20 weeks gestation, but the vote was canceled at the last minute when Boehner apparently was unsure of the support he would get for the plan.
It was a ban that had found approval in Congress earlier, but not only did it not get support this year, it also has not been rescheduled for a vote.
Newman called the developments in Congress a “slap in the face of the pro-life movement.”
“We want a whole lot more,” he said. “We expect a whole lot from this Congress.”
The GOP expanded its majority in the U.S. House during the 2014 midterm elections and took control of the U.S. Senate for the first time in years.
“It’s something that cannot be ignored,” Newman said. “This speaker is weak, his policies are weak, his plan for implementing pro-life legislation is weak.”
He said if it becomes necessary, there may be future events at additional congressional offices.
Such civil disobedience has been used before by the pro-life movement. Some of the efforts by Joe Scheidler and the Pro-Life Action League were so effective in the 1980s that abortion advocates took them to court and accused them of racketeering.
It took 28 years and three trips to the U.S. Supreme Court to finish the case – a decision in which the pro-lifers’ actions were vindicated entirely.
WND’s original report on the Boehner sit-in included an interview with Stanek.
“I, as a nurse at a hospital in Chicago, held an abortion survivor for 45 minutes until he died, and he was 21 weeks old,” she said. “An abortion ban such as this would save babies like I held. This is very real to me. I have actually seen and held the babies that the House is just playing around with willy-nilly right now.”
Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Jill Stanek:
She noted the bill wasn’t given a vote even though the previous GOP-run House had passed it.
“When we protest on March 25, it will have been two months. We’ve been patient, more than measured in our response, more than muted. I, among others, am just not going to stand for this anymore,” Stanek said.
The sticking point in the legislation centered on the exception for rape and incest victims, who would be required to provide a police report of the crime before receiving an abortion. Stanek thinks the exception is a bad idea altogether.
“There should have never been a rape-incest exception to begin with,” she said. “We’re talking about five months along in pregnancy. Certainly by that time, mothers should know that they’re pregnant. And certainly, babies, even if they’re conceived in rape or incest, are innocent victims, too, and shouldn’t be put to death.”
Speaker Boehner and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., had tapped Republican women to be the face of this legislation, but it was ultimately two GOP women who forced the bill back on the shelf. Reps. Renee Ellmers, R-N.C., and Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., made it clear at the GOP retreat before the vote that they had problems forcing victims of crime to bring a police report with them to get an abortion.
Stanek said if you’re going to have the exception, not requiring women to present a police report would make the law virtually meaningless.
“Late-term abortions aren’t good for women to begin with, but taking out this reporting requirement would just give a huge loophole to abortionists to check that box every time a woman came in for a late-term abortion and says she’s been raped,” said Stanek, who argued the reporting requirement also makes women safer.
“Making women report their crime to police protects other women from being victimized by these sexual perpetrators and protects the very women themselves against these perpetrators from violating them again,” she said. “Some of these women are victims of incest, and girls are victims of incest. If they don’t have to report the crime, then the evidence is covered up, literally killed when the abortion is committed.”
Stanek said the bill never should have been sidelined.
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“They didn’t even take a headcount to see if they had the votes. They had the votes. At the last moment, the chief opponent, Renee Ellmers, said she would vote for the bill, but they just chickened out, and they took advantage of the pro-life movement.”
The protest does carry some legal risks for participants, but Stanek believes the cause is worth it.
“It’s going to be a sit-in,” she said. “We’re going to risk arrest, but this form of civil disobedience is nothing compared to what is happening to these children every day.”
Organizers are inviting pro-life activists from across the nation to join. Speaker Boehner’s office is located at 1011 in the Longworth House Office Building in Washington, D.C.
The name of the event is #FreeTheBan. More information is available at the event’s Facebook page.
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Boehner office on eve of civil disobedience
Drew Zahn
Tue, 24 Mar 2015 00:30:52 GMT
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