ONWARD, PRO-LIFE SOLDIERS!

It is the days after the election. The Senate and the House of Representatives are under the control of pro-abortion Democrats. And the Democratic Speaker of the House declares confidently on TV that the passage of the "Freedom of Choice Act" (FOCA) in the next congressional term is "a done deal." Worse, the president promises to sign the "Freedom of Choice Act" But wait, that was the election of 1992.

After the 1992 election, pro-lifers faced the pro-abortion leadership's trifecta: Bill Clinton, the nation's first openly pro-abortion president; George Mitchell, the pro-abortion Democratic Majority Leader in the Senate; and Tom Foley, the pro-abortion Democratic Speaker of the House, who so confidently predicted the passage of the infernal FOCA bill.

The "Freedom of Choice Act" would have made unlimited abortion on demand a federal rightproperly enacted by Congress and signed by the president. Charges that a phony "right" had been extra-constitutionally imposed by the Supreme Court's "legislating from the bench" in 1973 would have been moot. With the FOCA passed, it would have been all nice and legal, because "the people" would have spoken through their senators and representatives. And that would have been that. Except, it wasn't.

The FOCA never passed. And in 1994, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell abandoned his senatorial career, and Speaker Tom Foley lost his bid for re-election"the first time a House speaker had been defeated in his home district since 1862" (The Almanac of American Politics - 2004).

Why did the FOCA never pass? Because, undeterred by the disappointing outcome of the 1992 election, NRLC embarked on a well-organized, tireless, and expensive campaign to defeat the diabolical FOCAand we prevailed.

My point here is that we at NRLC and you, our supporters, cannot retreat into discouragement and disappointment just because some pro-life candidates lost at the ballot box in 2006. We have faced worse before.

One thing was new during the last election campaign: Heeding the lessons from previous national election defeats, the pro-abortion campaign leadership in the national Democratic Party recruited many candidates who were willing to advertise themselves as "moderate," "socially conservative," or, supposedly, "pro-life."