• Front
• Sunday Sermons
• Catholic Replies
• Washington Watch
• Prayer
• First Teachers
• From The Mail

By DEXTER DUGGAN

SAN FRANCISCO — Colette Wilson held 18- month- old daughter Lucy, outfitted in baby pink with red dots, at St. Mary of the Assumption Cathedral here while pro- lifers streamed out toward their next stop, the plaza outside San Francisco City Hall.

Lucy and the other three adopted children in the Wilson family can gaze at blue skies like the one this morning because their birth mothers avoided appointments with abortionists.

City Hall here is where baseball star Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe almost exactly 58 years ago, and where Mayor Gavin Newsom argued the revolutionary notion in February 2004 that samesex couples should be able to wed. The pro- lifers who attended the commemorative Mass atop Cathedral Hill on January 21 wereheaded to join with an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people looking to solemnize a different kind of union outside City Hall, reuniting U. S. law with respect for unborn infants.

With rallies, marches, and public presentations, millions of Americans each January press forward for a better future while marking with regret the U. S. Supreme Court’s invention of a fictitious national constitutional right to permissive abortion throughout pregnancy on January 22, 1973.

The Walk for Life West Coast, which first stepped out in assertively liberal San Francisco in 2005, soon grew to be the nation’s second- largest annual pro- life footprint.

This year pro- lifers covered the broad plaza for a rally in front of the blue- and- gold- domed City Hall, then filled the major downtown thoroughfare of Market Street to walk to the Port of San Francisco’s Ferry Building on the Bay.

Along Market Street, a few small, scattered groups of proabortionists watched from the sidewalk.

By prearrangement with police, the pro- life walkers peacefully marched curb- to- curb and shut off motorized traffic along the route of more than a mile and a half.

In many parts of the country, pro- lifers expect and accept the likelihood of bad weather for their January demonstrations. However, the complete cloud cover and cold rain here on January 20 disappeared and the sun shone for the January 21 observance. The day after the walk, all the clouds and rain returned on January 22.

Colette and Tim Wilson came up from San Diego with their four adopted children to participate. If planned abortions had been carried out, none of the youngsters would have been here.

As her youngest, dark- hued child put her hand flat onto a reporter’s notebook, Colette, an attorney, toldThe Wanderer, “ Lucy was a save from the Bakersfield clinic. To those who say this is a losing cause, tell that to Lucy.”

Colette described the other children’s situations.

— Jack was born the day Terri Schiavo was killed in Florida, on March 31, 2005. His mother, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, went to a downtown Los Angeles clinic for a second- trimester abortion but was told the abortion would take two days, although she was off work only one day a week. “While she was standing there crying” about her problem, a pro- lifer went up to her; — Vida had a 17-year-old mother who went to an abortion clinic but was persuaded by a pro- lifer outside to give birth in 2000; — Paul’s mother was being pressured to have an abortion in 1998, so she pretended to go to the abortuary but went on to give birth. Asked by The Wanderer if there seems to be a sense of human unity by having these children of different races under one family roof, Tim Wilson indicated that race isn’t the focus. “ You forget that they’re different races. . . . They’re just kids.”

The City Hall rally lasted almost exactly an hour, with a large sign saying “ Abortion Hurts Women” behind the speakers, who told of serious suffering due to the availabilityof abortion. Vansen Wong, MD, from Sacramento, said he did hundreds of abortions as a way to make “ easy money” while he was pursuing a medical degree, but now regrets “ the destruction of every precious life. . . .

“ In a way I had to delude myself this was the right thing to do,” said Wong, the acting director of the pro- life Alternative Pregnancy Center.

He said he tried to ease his conscience by telling himself it wasn’t really his decision to do the abortions, he was only carrying out the pregnant woman’s decision, and who was he to say she was wrong?

But “ God got a- hold of me,” Wong said, ending his remarks by declaring, “ Abortion is barbaric. Abortion is intolerable . . . and abortion has no place in any civilized society.”

Another speaker, Jacquie Stalnaker, a former Miss West Virginia, said she thought she had “a great boyfriend,” but he pulled a gun on her and forced her to an abortion clinic, insisting there “was no other answer” to her pregnancy.

“So in my moment of pure fear and desperation, I allowed this to happen,” Stalnaker said. “. . . But I can tell you the very second that my child had been dismembered in my body” 24 years ago.

The abortuary only told her that if she had any pain, she could take an aspirin or go to the emergency room, she said, but she lost six units of blood and was in the hospital for three days.

In subsequent years, the abortion “ has affected every relationship I have been involved in,” Stalnaker said, adding that she doesn’t know her baby’s hair color or appearance, but “My Lily Gabrielle intercedes for me in Heaven. . . .

“This is the kind of thing that absolutely disintegrates your life,” she said, requesting that audience members tell about her experience if they know someone who favors abortion. “We’re real people with real stories,” said Stalnaker, a regional representative of the Silent No More Campaign of women who regret their abortions.

Lori Hoye, chief financial officer of the Issues 4 Life Foundation and wife of pro-life activist clergyman Walter Hoye of Oakland, told the crowd, “If you were born after 1972, you are a survivor of the abortion holocaust.”

The Hoyes have a special ministry to fellow African-Americans who are targeted for abortion by organizations like the racist- based Planned Parenthood.

Hoye told of difficulties and challenges she faced as she struggled to improve her life after being born to an unwed mother.

After she met her future husband, Walter, she said, he led her to Jesus. “We need to end abortion today,” she exclaimed. “And there is nothing, nothing, nothing too hard for God.”

New Jersey’s Rev. Clenard Childress, director of the Life Education and Resource Network (L.E.A.R.N.) and founder of blackgenocide.org, pointed to the looming refusal of Barack Obama’s government medical program to allow for conscience protection against the culture of death.

“ The mask is coming off now, and we’re beginning to see the true agenda of this administration,” Childress said.

Although Obama is the most proabortion president in history, he said, that has strengthened pro-lifers’ efforts.

“Most of America is pro-life because you walked, because you shouted. . . . Our time is coming,” Childress said. “. . . We will prevail. . . . You’re going to see it in your lifetime.”

Childress spoke as someone well aware of the challenges.

“The media will censor you, no question about it,” he said. Politicians “ will abuse you, there’s no question about it.”

A Press Blackout

Predictably, the region’s dominant newspaper, the liberal San Francisco Chronicle, gave the walk a small two-column-wide photo but no story on page C- 3 on January 22. The caption said “ thousands” protested abortion.

However, the previous day’s

Chronicle, on January 21, provided a notable front-page story and photo about “several hundred” local, liberal “ Occupy” movement protesters, plus nearly a half-page additional coverage inside, along with a second photo.

The Wanderer mentioned the

Chronicle’s small Walk for Life photo to longtime walk volunteer worker Gibbons Cooney. He replied, “Yeah. It’s hysterical. People ask me how large [the walk] was. I respond, ‘Large enough to need a liberal press blackout’.”

Cooney added that the San Jose

Mercury News reported 50,000 people participating, “but I think it was more. We had a stationary video camera in a hotel room at the foot of Market Street. Marchers went past steadily and solidly for one hour.”

A few days earlier, on January 17,

Chronicle columnist C. W. Nevius had already figured what to do about the deplorable pro-lifers: “The best approach, of course, would be to let them have their moment, ignore them, and then go back to real life in San Francisco.”

Nevius began by admiring the greatness of San Francisco but lamenting the possibility the town might get taken in by the pro-life “fringe”: “The great thing about living in San Francisco is that it is socially and culturally responsible. The bad thing is, a city that is so socially and culturally responsible can’t resist taking the bait when a fringe group tries to provoke a reaction.”

However, a prominent letter to the editor in the January 20 Chronicle

disagreed, saying, “Allowing the misogynists to march unopposed only emboldens them.”

Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, attended the California event before heading east for the January 23 National March for Life in Washington, D.C.

Pavone told The Wanderer that it makes sense to hold the West Coast walk because it can be impractical for some people to go all the way back east.

“It’s important for California, too, being the state with the most abortions,” he continued, explaining that opposition to permissive abortion is seen everywhere in the United States. “. . . There’s no place in the nation where there’s no one standing up against abortion. . . .

“The biggest problem for the abortion movement and their biggest pain . . . is that we have not gone away. They did not count on that,” Pavone said, citing aNew York Times

editorial in 1973 happily claiming that the Supreme Court had settled the abortion issue.

In this national election year, Pavone said, it’s important to mobilize voters to elect politicians who believe in serving the public, not killing the public.

Moral Energy

The Wanderer spent some time in the city’s North Beach neighborhood at Saints Peter and Paul Church, whose two white, neo-baroque spires look down on relaxing Washington Square, just down the slope from Telegraph Hill. The spires are likely to show up in a number of photos people take of Telegraph Hill, topped by Coit Tower.

The area is dotted with Italian restaurants and businesses with Chinese- language signs. Straight down Columbus Avenue (or, as some street signs say, “Corso Cristoforo Colombo”)

looms the iconic TransamericaPyramid tower.

Saints Peter and Paul Parish “has always been very pro-life, very promarriage, very pro-family,” said Walk for Life volunteer Cooney, who said the parish is about one-third Italian, one- third Chinese, and one- third other people.

When Gavin Newsom began issuing licenses for “gay marriage” in 2004, Cooney said, defenders of traditional marriage responded with an all-night adoration at the parish, followed by Mass and a rally in Washington Square across the street. Cooney said Newsom had been baptized at Saints Peter and Paul.

Evidence of the moral energy of the 1,500 people who demonstrated to defend traditional marriage inspired residents Eva Muntean and Dolores Meehan to start planning for the first Walk for Life West Coast the following year, Cooney said.

Some students from out of town for the walk stay in the parish’s school gym, where Los Angeles pro-life activist Pedro Diaz-Rubin, an aerospace engineer, pays an annual visit to conduct a holy hour for the students with a meditation on the unborn Jesus.

Diaz toldThe Wanderer that he works to increase consciousness that Jesus was an unborn child, too: “When women pray to Jesus in the womb, they make a connection with their own unborn babies. . . . The womb becomes more holy to them.”

He has been conducting such meditations in Los Angeles for “ probably over ten years now,” Diaz said, and two parishes there have a weekly unborn Jesus holy hour, St. Peter Chanel and his own parish, also named Saints Peter and Paul.

More information on the Unborn Jesus Apostolate is at www.unborn jesus.com.

Before the walk, the Mass at the packed St. Mary’s Cathedral was celebrated by San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer, joined by 11 bishops and auxiliary bishops. Last August Niederauer had emergency heart surgery, but appeared in good health now.

In his homily, Niederauer said the message of the Gospel is to “have no anxiety at all,” which is easier said than done because “we’re used to assuming that everything depends on us.”

Although the pro-life fight has been prolonged, the archbishop said, “we know that time is on our side,” and “so are the sonograms.”

While the other side shouldn’t play at being God by deciding who lives and dies, he said, pro-lifers shouldn’t be judgmental Pharisees. “We must fervently pray for everyone,” including “those who oppose us,” he said.

Pro-abortionists confidently expected opposition to permissive abortion would fade and die within a few years afterRoe and Doe

were imposed by the Supreme Court. However, students who weren’t born until long after 1973, and have only lived in a legally pro-abortion America, are eager to end this legal aberration.

Diana Urbina, 21, of Johnson City, Tenn., studying at John Paul the Great Catholic University in San Diego, told The Wanderer that she saw only a handful of pro-abortionists along the Walk for Life route. “They’re dwindling. God’s side is winning,” she said.

Abigail Taylor, 17, whose family recently moved to Phoenix, said she was “really excited” to be in San Francisco to join the walk.

Jessi Zuleger, 18, who also came from Phoenix for the walk, said, “I know personally I will continue to go to abortion clinics to pray, [and] as many rallies as I have to, until the end of abortion.”

Photo by Peggy Moen

Minnesota pro- lifers came from all around the state to join the January 22 MCCL March for Life.

Photo by Jean Coelho