During the week of events leading up to the March for Life, there was a feeling of optimism and
One of the pro-life leaders I met with was my friend, Dr. Angela Lanfranchi, a leading expert on the link between abortion and breast cancer.
During lunch, she shared a rare emotional moment as she recalled her experience as a third-year med student who witnessed an infant “born alive” through a chemical abortion — and also what led her to become a breast cancer surgeon. Here is what Dr. Lanfranchi wrote about this earlier:
Thirty years ago when Roe v. Wade was decided, I was a third-year medical student at Georgetown University. The third year is when medical students leave the classroom and go into hospitals to do their clinical rotations. The ruling had an immediate effect on the practice and ethics of medicine. No longer would my obstetrics professor tell his students that
his was a unique specialty, that he always had two patients to consider, mother and child.
Now only when the mother wanted the child did we treat two patients. When the mother didn’t want the child, no consideration would be given to the unborn’s humanity. It was no longer a child but a blob of tissue, a “product of conception,” a parasitic entity or whatever the mother chose to call “it.”
For the first time, every doctor in every state could legally kill another human being.
On my pediatric rotation that year, I helped to resuscitate a child who was born four months prematurely crying aloud, struggling to breathe. She was the result of a failed abortion. She was wizened and burned from the hypertonic saline used to try to kill her on the hospital floor just below the nursery. I can still see her clearly in my mind’s eye.
One and a half years after Roe v. Wade, when I graduated something else very profound had happened. The Hippocratic Oath we took, that had stood medicine in good stead for twenty-four hundred years, had been changed. The part about refusing to give a woman a pessary to induce an abortion had been deleted.
Ten years after Roe v. Wade I watched my mother fight and lose her battle with breast cancer. Added to her physical torment was her mental anguish at the thought of leaving my youngest brother before he was fully grown.
Little did we know during that lunch just a month ago that in the weeks immediately following the March, New York would make late-term abortion-on-demand the law of the state and enable those who murder pregnant women to get away with killing their babies, and that pediatric neurologist and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam would offer indefensible support for leaving a baby born alive after being aborted to die. Other states are also considering expanding late-term abortions and infanticide, including Massachusetts, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Perhaps you feel frustrated and don’t know what difference you can make. First, write your state representatives and make it clear that women deserve better than late-term abortions and that no children should be left to die.
Then help us connect as many people as possible to WomenDeserveBetter.com so that you can help a woman in need Work, Learn, Live, and Love better! Think it won’t make a difference? Read this! And then consider the following steps:
1. Order our new Women Deserve Better brochures.
2. Use these ideas to post our downloadable ad and brochures. See which places make sense for you to distribute this essential information.
3. Put your “Say NO to the Status Quo: Women Deserve Better.com” bumper sticker on your car!
Just think: You may not know what woman and child were helped by your action, but we know it IS helping her before and after children are born!
As Anthony said more than 130 years ago, as she defended the rights of pregnant widows to maintain custody of their children, “…sweeter even than to have had the joy of caring for children of my own has it been to me to help bring about a better state of things for mothers generally, so that their unborn little ones could not be willed away from them.”
So don’t be frustrated. Take action.
Thank you.
Because women deserve better,
Serrin M. Foster
President
P.S. Be sure to check out FFL member Marilyn Kopp’s latest letter to the editor in The Cleveland Plain Dealer. If you also get a letter, article, or op-ed published featuring our pro-woman, pro-life message, please share it with us. Be sure to identify yourself as a member of Feminists for Life. Thank you!
