Mission Possible Lives On.

"For many National Right to Life Committee leaders, the Minnesota convention will be a homecoming." [Minneapolis] Star Tribune, June 15.

By any measure, NRLC's 2005 convention was an unqualified success. The four general sessions and Prayer Breakfast drew large (and emotional) turnouts, the workshops covered every pro-life topic from abortifacients to the United Nations, and even the media coverage of the local abortion-loving newspaper was surprisingly even-handed.

Minnesota's role as host of the convention spotlighted what the Star Tribune described as 'the state's prominence in the national abortion debate." The reporter noted that a number of NRLC staff came to NRLC from the pro-life Movement in Minnesota, including Executive Director Dr. David N. O'Steen and Associate Executive Director Darla St. Martin.

What the reporter didn't mention (probably because she didn't know) was that Dr. O'Steen and Mrs. St. Martin held comparable positions with Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) before they came to Washington, D.C. During their tenure at MCCL, they launched a daring initiative whose significance only a small number of veterans remember.

"Mission Possible" was their brain child, and it is no exaggeration to say that this outreach project changed the face of the Pro-Life Movement. Mission Possible, which obviously drew its inspiration from the wildly popular television program, Mission Impossible, took flight in 1975.

The need for what it undertook is as obvious in retrospect as it was unprecedented at the time it was undertaken: shore up the pro-life presence in states, especially in the Southeast, many of whom were badly underfunded and thoroughly outgunned by the pro-abortionists.

At the time much of the Movement's emphasis was on passage of a Human Life Amendment (HLA). Such an amendment faced staggering difficulties.