Catholic Leader Tells Pro-Life Convention Be Careful How You Present Abortion

LifeNews.com | Steven Ertelt | June 19, 2007

Kansas City, MO (LifeNews.com) — Last week at the National Right to Life convention, a leading Catholic official said that the pro-life community needs to be mindful of how it presents the message of abortion. As with any good advertising or public relations campaign, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City said pro-life people must know their audience.

During his speech, Naumann references the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” and said the pro-life movement needs a brain and a heart to present the best pro-life message possible.

“We need to pray for not only a brain, but for the wisdom to know how to best communicate to our contemporaries the sanctity of human life,” he explained.

If the pro-life movement is “not prudent in the manner of presentation, [it] can actually drive people away from the truth.”

Archbishop Naumann said the pro-live movement can sometimes bee too harsh or condemning in its language, which can turn off potential supporters and alienate women who have had abortions who need love and forgiveness.

To “effectively communicate with love,” the Catholic official explained, pro-life people must “bear some responsibility” for how it is presented and be responsible for their language when it becomes off-putting.

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1) | Top | Jun 23 2007 | Dean Scourtes

Archbishop Naumann has it exactly right, but it is an argument that cuts both ways.

There is much more support for pro-life positions among Democratoc voters than most people realize, but it much of it disintegrates when the issue is used as a political or culture war weapon by the right.
Conversely, support for Democrats decline when abortion is also used as a weapon in the culture war by the pro-abortion left.

Melinda Henneberger, writing in the NY Times castigates Democratic leaders:

A handful of Catholic bishops spoke out more plainly than in any previous election season and moved the Catholic swing vote that Al Gore had won in 2000 to Mr. Bush.

The standard response from Democratic leaders has been that anyone lost to them over this issue is not coming back — and that regrettable as that might be, there is nothing to be done. But that is not what I heard from these voters.

Many of them, Catholic women in particular, are liberal, deep-in-their-heart Democrats who support social spending, who opposed the war from the start and who cross their arms over their chests reflexively when they say the word “Republican.” Some could fairly be described as desperate to find a way home. And if the party they’d prefer doesn’t send a car for them, with a really polite driver, it will have only itself to blame.

What would it take to win them back? Respect, for starters — and not only on the night of the candidate forum on faith. As it turns out, you cannot call people extremists and expect them to vote for you. But real respect would require an understanding that what supporters of abortion rights genuinely see as a hard-earned freedom, opponents genuinely see as a self-inflicted wound and — though I can feel some of you tensing as you read this — a human rights issue comparable to slavery.

Why Pro-Choice Is a Bad Choice for Democrats. NY Times, June 22, 2007

The Catholic Church, by placing the abortion issue to prominently within a more comprehensive, Consistent Ethic of Life are transforming abortion into a “liberal” issue in the minds of a gowing number of Christians of politically liberal orientation, but the Democratic leadership has yet to realize this.

Catholic Leader Tells Pro-Life Convention Be Careful How You Present Abortion

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