When an unborn baby is scheduled for execution, Red Rose Rescuers act to love him By Monica Migliorino Miller, Ph. D. for Life Site News
When the parents of a preborn child schedule an abortion, in effect, their baby has become abandoned. The pro-life rescue may be the only act of love performed for that child in his life.
“Love your neighbor as yourself.”
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
“Rescue those being dragged to death, and from those tottering to execution withdraw not.”
“If we believe abortion is murder, we should act like it.”
Not so very long ago, tens of thousands of pro-lifers, inspired by the above statements, blocked the doors to abortion centers. Thousands were arrested, hundreds convicted in courts of law, and many served time in jail. I am of course referring to the heyday of the pro-life rescue movement — a movement that began in the mid-1970s and ended in the mid-1990s — a movement that involved priests, ministers, Protestants and Catholics, men and women, a whole host of young people, and even a few bishops such as Daniel Lynch and Austin Vaughn. The commitment of these pro-lifers was epitomized by Joan Andrews Bell who served two years of a five year sentence, eighteen months of which was spent in solitary confinement. Under the leadership of Randall Terry, Operation Rescue marked the high point of this activist effort in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
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One may ask: Where did all the rescuers go? The answer to that question is complex, but certainly a large part of the answer lies in the passage of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) passed by Congress in 1994. FACE had the very effect the abortion industry hoped it would — it brought what had been the largest movement involving civil disobedience in American history to a halt. Prior to FACE, pro-lifers who blocked the doors to abortion centers received city citations or state misdemeanor charges for trespassing or disorderly conduct. Now anyone blocking ingress or egress to an abortion facility could be tried in federal court, risk a lengthy federal prison term and, with a second FACE conviction, become a felon. Add to this, several major rescue leaders, including myself, married and began to have children. Needless to say, it’s hard to mother children from a jail cell. And with the movement facing the hammer of FACE, no one stepped forward to assume leadership that involved such serious risk. In a word, few pro-lifers were willing to face the sacrifices such defense of the unborn required.
However, a small band of pro-lifers, who had been active in the rescue movement, continued to be prodded by the words of Proverbs 24:11: “Rescue those being dragged to death, and from those tottering to execution withdraw not.” They gathered for a series of meetings in the Spring of 2017 to discuss whether it might be possible to begin doing rescues again. For literally decades I nurtured a strategy, perfecting in my head a new way to do rescues that did not involve, nor even necessitate, blocking abortion clinic doors. I envisioned that pro-lifers would enter abortion centers, sit down next to the mothers in the waiting room and make a last effort to persuade them not to abort their children, offering words of encouragement and practical help. But should women still opt to kill the unborn, the pro-lifers would remain in the abortion center in solidarity with the unwanted about to be executed — in other words, be a pro-life presence for as long as possible inside the very places where the killing actually occurs — offering a non-violent act of defense for them.
