Why we must pray and not just vote pro-life

Last week, I wrote about the decision of the Northern Illinois Women's Center to close its doors permanently after 40 years and well in excess of 50,000 abortions—more than a third of the current population of Rockford, Illinois, where the clinic was located. The closing of this house of horrors had nothing to do with the current presidential race, or even with the actions of previous "pro-life" presidents. In fact, this certifiably unsafe clinic would have been closed 22 years ago, and tens of thousands of babies would have been saved, had not the administration of "pro-life" president George H.W. Bush convinced the Illinois attorney general to settle the case of Turnock v. Ragsdale out of court, in order to prevent it from being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Turnock was the first case involving abortion to be placed on the Court's docket after Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) upheld the first significant state restrictions on abortion since Roe.

Turnock was widely expected to give the Supreme Court the opportunity to revisit Roe itself, and the Bush administration did not want that to happen. So Turnock was settled out of court; Illinois created a new class of "lightly regulated" abortion clinics; and a few months later, President Bush appointed the pro-abortion David Souter to the Supreme Court, saving Roe—and ensuring that abortion would continue to be an issue in national elections up to this very day.

No, the closing of the Northern Illinois Women's Center had nothing to do with national politics, and everything to do with the hard work and dedication of local Christians who prayed the rosary on the sidewalks in front of it every day that the clinic was open for business. During the scorching summers here on the Midwestern plains, on bitter winter mornings in blizzard-like conditions with wind chills of -20 or -30, entire families bore witness to the Culture of Life. They offered women who thought they had no choice the financial and emotional support to bring their children to term. They welcomed those women into their own homes, and even made some of those children members of their own families through adoption.
They did, in short, everything that abortion-rights advocates claim pro-life Christians never do, and they succeeded in ending the slaughter that a "pro-life" president had ensured would continue for over two decades.

Remember that story, if you begin to believe that the fight against abortion has been lost. Remember that story, if you are tempted to think that the only way to fight abortion is to swallow hook, line, and sinker the promises of national "pro-life" candidates. Remember that story, and recall the words of Psalm 146, and know that the Lord is faithful, even when men are not:

Praise the Lord, O my soul,
in my life I will praise the Lord: I will sing to my God as long as I shall be.
Put not your trust in princes: in the children of men, in whom there is no salvation.
His spirit shall go forth, and he shall return into his earth: in that day all their thoughts shall perish.
Blessed is he who hath the God of Jacob for his helper, whose hope is in the Lord his God:
who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all things that are in them.
Who keepeth truth for ever: who executeth judgment for them that suffer wrong: who giveth food to the hungry. The Lord looseth them that are fettered:
the Lord enlighteneth the blind. The Lord lifteth up them that are cast down: the Lord loveth the just.
The Lord keepeth the strangers, he will support the fatherless and the widow: and the ways of sinners he will destroy.
The Lord shall reign for ever: thy God, O Sion, unto generation and generation.