By Judy Zabik
Last January, Michigan Citizens for Life and their leader, Cal Zastrow, proposed the Prenatal Child Protection Amendment. It would amend the Michigan Constitution to define life as beginning at conception. As an executive board member of Right to Life - Lifespan, I met with Cal to form a coalition of pro-lifers. In order to get the amendment onto the November 2006 ballot, we had to collect almost 318,000 valid signatures in six months. Cal and his colleagues had been inspired by the highly successful 2004 Michigan Defense of Marriage petition drive that gathered over 500,000 signatures in a record 10 weeks. Subsequently, 59 percent of Michigan voters passed that amendment. After much research by doctors and lawyers, the terms hammered out for the Prenatal Child Protection Amendment were: "The right to due process, whereby no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law... and the right to equal protection of the law, guaranteed in Article 1, Section 2, vest at conception." And "A 'person,' for purposes of the Constitution and laws of the State of Michigan, exists from the moment of conception." When a local reporter and asked me why, if the amendment premise was so simple, we hadn't done this years ago, I was dumbstruck. Why hadn't we done it before then? I couldn't answer her then. I can now, however, because this is a story of sabotage by people who should have been our allies.
http://clmagazine.org/backissues/2007janfeb_34-36sabotageinmichigan.pdf
Leslie,
Why on earth are you posting a 6 month-old article (which includes a ton of false information) from the January/February issue of American Life League's magazine? This isn't news. This isn't helpful. This is the story of some prolifers who thought they could get a certain number of signatures and get more than 50% of Michiganders to vote for their petition language to ban all abortions. They weren't organized, they didn't have a good plan and so they failed. And now they want to blame another prolife organization for their own failures. How sad.
I guess when your organizations lives to attack other prolife organizations all you can do is post attacks on other prolife organizations (like Right to Life of Michigan) who are actually doing something more than placing newspaper ads attacking other prolife organizations.
What would the prolife movement look like if we all followed CRTL and ALL examples of attacking other prolife organizations?