. . . because action speaks louder than words.
League history, NOW v. Scheidler, Action News, Joe Scheidler, League staff
Q & A on abortion, the unborn child, where we stand on the issues and more
Helping abortion-bound women choose life for their babies
Unmasking the truth about abortion in the public square
Our youth outreach, raising up a new generation of pro-life leaders
Abortion industry converts tell the inside story
News and commentary from the Pro-Life Action League
News and commentary from the Pro-Life Action League
Walter Hoye (right) with Ann and Joe Scheidler in Hawaii last year
In Oakland, California, Pastor Walter Hoye started praying at an abortion clinic when two elderly women asked him to join them because most of the clinic’s clients were African-American.
A quiet, devout man, Hoye began to counsel the women coming to that clinic. And he saved babies. So, in short order, the City of Oakland passed a bubble zone ordinance to try to keep Pastor Hoye and the two older women from reaching out to women and offering them a real choice.
Pastor Hoye was arrested under the ordinance, in spite of the fact that he actually abided by the stipulation not to reach into the 8-foot floating bubble around the abortion clinic clients. He refused to pay a fine and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. [Continue reading ...]
On Wednesday the Ms. Magazine Blog reported, “Yesterday, the Alaskan primary ballot included a measure to institute a parental notification law for minors seeking abortions. Unfortunately, the law passed.”
That last sentence sums up the attitude of radical feminists, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and others who seek the breakdown of the traditional family.
Rather than see parental involvement in an adolescent’s health care — in this case, surgery or drugs to kill her unborn baby — as a positive influence in a young girl’s life, they view a parent’s role as intrusive, if not downright abusive. [Continue reading ...]
The Pro-Life Action League is excited to announce an affiliation with Matthew Kelly’s Dynamic Catholic apostolate. Let me tell you a little bit about this opportunity.
Last spring my daughter Cathy invited me to join her family for a talk by Matthew Kelly at a large parish in suburban Chicago. It was the third day of the mission and the church was packed to capacity—nearly a thousand people, many of whom had come for the first two days as well.
Ann Scheidler at Sidewalk Counseling Seminar, July 24 [Photo by Joe Scheidler]
On Saturday, July 24, I gave a sidewalk counseling seminar at St. Ansgar’s Parish in Hanover Park, Illinois. Greg and Sandy Kascewicz took the initiative to organize and publicize the seminar attended by over three dozen potential sidewalk counselors.
Many people who regularly go out to pray at an abortion clinic are reticent to approach an abortion-bound woman to offer her a chance to choose life.
Admittedly it seems difficult to intrude in someone else’s personal life an decisions. But the pro-lifer who steps out in faith to come to an abortion clinic must realize that he or she has something very valuable to offer a woman who thinks abortion is her only choice. We offer hope, life and real choice.
Ann Scheidler holds a 3rd trimester abortion sign on the corner of Adams and Wacker downtown Chicago [Photo by Sam Scheidler]
During our Face the Truth Tour last week, as I stood along Adams Street near Union Station in downtown Chicago holding a “Choice” sign, a woman stopped to talk with me. She thanked me for being there and said that people need to see what abortion is. She told me that if abortion had not been available, she would have a 37-year old son today.
The woman told me her whole story. She was a teenager and doing drugs, and had already broken up with her boyfriend when she discovered she was pregnant. This was 1973—the first year abortion was legal throughout the United States.
I was pregnant in 1973 too. Fortunately my situation was pretty ideal. I was married and happy to be expecting my fourth child. I’d like to think that I would never have considered abortion, but we just don’t know what we might do if circumstances were different. [Continue reading ...]
Eric and April Scheidler and family
[Photo by Sam Scheidler]
Last week the US Department of Agriculture released its 2009 report on the cost of raising children. Not surprisingly, the cost is higher than it used to be—22% higher than in 1960.
According to the report the average cost of raising a child to the age of 18 is $222,360, the biggest increase being in child care and education, and most of that is child care. The nation’s media is quick to emphasize the fact that children don’t come cheap. But you need to take all these number with a grain of salt ($2.99 per pound).
For the first 15 or 20 years of my involvement in the pro-life movement, the argument from abortion advocates was generally that the unborn baby was not a baby at all, but some lesser form of life they liked to call a “fetus.” Never mind that fetus is simply one of the many stages of human life.
But it seems in more recent times that occasionally the truth comes out of the mouths of the vocal defenders of abortion.
Case in point: last Wednesday, at the League’s Truth Day in Arlington Heights — As we stood along Rand Road at Arlington Heights Road an irate woman drove into the parking lot in front of where I was standing. She got out of her car and started yelling about how her one-year-old daughter had just seen a graphic abortion picture at the intersection.
Dick Bergquist and his children—some biological, some adopted—at the League’s 2002 Face the Truth Tour
When I was a kid there was an orphanage at the corner of Harlem and Touhy Avenues in Niles, IL, just northwest of Chicago. We used to see the kids out playing in the large yard behind the tall wrought iron fence (before Mayor Daley popularized the iron fence concept).
There was something mysterious and a bit romantic about all those kids whose families couldn’t care for them, and who might find a home with a loving family and play in their own yards.
Many children were adopted from orphanages like St. Hedwig’s in Niles. It closed in 1959 and the remaining orphans were transferred to Angel Guardian in Chicago, a Catholic Charities institution. I know lots of people whose families were built by adoption through Catholic Charities and other adoption agencies.
Adoption is a beautiful way to express love. Many active pro-lifers have provided foster homes for troubled children and babies born to a drug-addicted mother. Many have adopted children and formed strong loving families.
But widespread abortion has resulted in very few babies available to the more than 500,000 U.S. couples looking to adopt. [Continue reading ...]
On April 20, 1998 a Chicago federal jury ruled against Joe Scheidler and the Pro-Life Action League in the NOW v. Scheidler RICO case. It happened to be Justice John Paul Stevens’ 78th birthday.
Four years earlier Stevens had joined the entire Supreme Court in ruling that the National Organization for Women could use the RICO statute to go after pro-life protesters — specifically the Pro-Life Action League and Operation Rescue along with their respective founders, Joe Scheidler and Randall Terry.
In 2003 the U. S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of the protesters, deciding that they were not guilty of violating the RICO law.
The lone dissenter? John Paul Stevens who, in his dissent, called the Court’s ruling “murky.” He went on to write that the beneficiaries of the Court’s 8-1 ruling are a “class of professional criminals whose conduct persuaded Congress that the public needed federal protection from extortion.”
On Sunday evening my husband Joe and I attended the First Annual Life and Hope Concert benefiting the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation. The country music concert at the Murat Theatre in Indianapolis featured Collin Raye and Randy Travis. It was truly an upbeat celebration of life and many of the musical selections spoke to the value of life, especially in several of the songs performed by Collin Raye.
Prior to the concert, John Condit, one of the coordinators of the event, revealed to a few pro-life leaders gathered at a pre-concert reception, that Collin Raye’s granddaughter, who had suffered her whole life with a severe neurological disorder, had died at age 9 on Holy Saturday.
Because the whole issue of cognitive disorder is so close to Raye’s heart he chose to go ahead with the Life and Hope Concert in spite of the fact that he had just attended his granddaughter’s funeral on Wednesday. He mentioned the importance of the cause several times in the course of his performance.