SPEAK UP AND ORGANIZE.(politicians and pro lifers of United States)

Years ago, the movers and shakers of the elite thought that pro-lifers were hopelessly confined to the margins of the cultural and political life. Of course, one reason they perceived pro-lifers to be at the margin was that they wanted us to be at the margin, and they couldn't imagine us to be in the center. Besides, they did not have any acquaintances or friends who were pro-life.

This reminds me of the remark which a prominent movie critic in New York once made. After Richard Nixon had defeated George McGovern, she expressed complete astonishment at Nixon's victoryafter all, none of her friends and acquaintances had voted for Nixon.

This elitist insularity is, of course, the reason why the "mainstream media" are losing their grip on the political life of the country. Let's admit it, we call them "mainstream" in a way to point out that they are anything but mainstream.

A primitive, but nevertheless important, reason why the mainstream political elitists don't grasp why pro-lifers lobby for the right to life, is that they cannot understand why we exert ourselves for the benefit of someone else, the unborn. After all, we possess life already. Normally, lobbyists seek legislation on taxes and regulations to benefit their own group directly. But what we lobby for makes the National Right to Life Committee a very unusual player in public life.

In practical terms, the elite has misunderstood the difference between the varying political power of the pro-life movement and the invariant truth of the right-to-life principle. Politically, we were very weak in 1973 and the years leading up to it. But the moral principle of the right to life was just as morally correct and intellectually powerful in 1973 as it is today.

What has changed over the years is not the right-to-life principle but our political and legal weight. When our political influence first became nationally visible, in the 1980s, the elitists in the media and the political consulting profession were eager to consign us to the societal margin, the extremist outland.

Eager to grab the voter "in the middle," many political consultants were comfortable with considering pro-lifers marginal and ineffective. They took this position not because they had clear evidence that it was so, but because they were uninformed about the right to life and the "real" pro-lifers. In that they resemble their target, the proverbial voter "in the middle," or, more accurately, the voter "in the mushy middle."