This is a two part series on the people who overturned Roe v. Wade. Today, January 22nd would be the 50th Anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, the Texas case that made it to the United States Supreme Court mandating abortion on demand. Today the abortion lobby would be holding celebrations from Hollywood to Washington, D.C. thanking their dark lord Lucifer for 50 years of child sacrifice on demand. But for them, due to the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Organization, it was not to be. This essay about the people who came from everyday walks of life and stepped out of the safety of anonymity to take a stand against the evil of our time. This essay is about the leaders of the Right to Life movement. And while it is about their leadership that is highlighted all their efforts would be for not had it not been for the thousands of Right to Life activists across America. From the people who run the crisis pregnancy centers to the donors who make the movement possible, to the side walk counselors and participants in the annual March for Life. This article is about you as much as it is about the people mentioned in this two part series.
Nellie Gray began what we know as The Right to Life (Pro-Life) movement with the March for Life. She was born in west Texas in 1924. During World War II Nellie Gray joined the military at age 20 serving in the Woman's Army Corps. After the war she went on to pursue her education at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. And after graduating from Georgetown she became a civil servant in the federal government for nearly three decades. A convert to Catholicism Ms. Gray was appalled by the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which originated from her home state of Texas. Ms. Gray decided to organize a Right to Life March for the following year and leave behind her government career. From 1974 to 2022 people in the millions descended on Washington D.C. around January 22 to hold a rally in the National Mall and then march up Constitution Avenue and over to the Supreme Court building. The rally started by Ms. Gray became the annual event for the Right to Life movement and an opportunity for activists to stay focused on one day overturning the Roe decision no matter how long it would take. Ms. Gray would not live to see that day, at least in this life. She died in 2012 at the age of 88.
Another crusader whose life was changed by the infamous Supreme Court decision was Joseph M. Scheidler who left behind his career in public relations after the Roe decision to devote himself full time to the Right to Life movement. It was Joe Scheidler who began in the Chicagoe area what is known today as Sidewalk Counseling. In Sidewalk Counseling Mr. Sheidler would approach women going into an abortion clinic in an attempt to talk them out of their decision. If the women was joined by a man he would call the man “Dad” as in “Hey Dad.” He would then would show pictures of babies in the womb at three months, six months, etc. Mr. Scheidler's methods found himself at odds with more established Pro-Life organizations who did not like his direct tactics. He went his own way in the movement when he founded the Pro-Life Action League in 1980.
Mr. Scheidler and his Pro-Life Action League had to endure years of litigation brought on by the National Organization of Women (NOW) for his work as a side walk counselor and Pro-Life activist beginning in 1986 and lasting until 2014. After a number of court defeats NOWs reluctance to give up the legal harassment of Mr. Scheidler forced them to pay the final court costs of his Pro-Life Action League in 2014.
He wrote books on how to close abortion clinics, instructional videos on how to side walk counsel women. In 2021 Mr. Sheidler died at age 93, one year before the Dobbs decision overturning Roe.
Joe Sheidler created side walk counseling as a way to save the unborn. Randall Terry took the Pro-Life movement from the sidewalk to the front door of the abortion clinic and crossed a line many in the movement were unwilling to follow. His Operation Rescue took the Pro-Life movement into civil disobedience which proved to be a turning point in the fight against abortion.
Beginning in the mid-1980s Mr. Terry's Operation Rescue began staging sit-ins in front of abortion clinics across the nation. These acts of civil disobedience not only lead to Mr. Terry's arrest as well as the arrest of his supporters, they aslo gained a great deal of press. Before Operation Rescue the abortion issue would be talked about at election time, perhaps mentioned by the press every January 22 as the anniversary of Roe v. Wade along with the March for Life. Abortion had become a part of American society because it out of sight and out of mind. Mass arrests in front of abortion clinics would change that.
Not everyone on the side of Life was in agreement. Reverend Charles Stanley of the First Baptist Church in Atlanta was a critic of Operation Rescue's tactics stating that he was unwilling to break the law in defense of the unborn. Randall Terrys rebuttal to that was if everyone thought like Rev. Stanley everyone would be Catholic and America would be British. In later years Terry would himself join the Catholic Church. Randall Terry's work on behalf of the unborn even came home with him in that he and his wife adopted several kids whose mothers had planned on having an abortion. Mr. Terry would leave Operation Rescue to pursue other endeavors for the Right to Life and the broader culture war. In 2012 he ran as a Democrat for president to challenge that party's stance on abortion. He won several counties in Oklahoma over incumbent President Obama in the primary.
Reverend Jerry Falwell was born in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1933. He came from a non-religious, dysfunctional home. He got religion in his teens when he met his future wife. They had three children. One went on to lead Thomas Road Baptist Church and another Liberty University both founded by Falwell.
Like most of his fellow religious politics was not something of interest to Rev. Falwell. Politics was worldly stuff the people of God should avoid. The cultural changes of the 1960s that included the sexual revolution brought about by the birth control pill and the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, along with the violent protests against the war in Vietnam were alarming to conservative Christians. The 1976 election of evangelical Christian Jimmy Carter was comforting to many evangelical Protestants. But in time many would turn against the man they considered one of their own. Jerry Falwell founded The Moral Majority which became the largest political organizations of evangelical Christians in the nation. In 1980 it would deliver two thirds of white evangelical voters to President Carter's Republican challenger former California Governor Ronald Reagan. The Moral Majority was an important faction in the Reagan coalition of the 1980s. It was essential to brining Protestants into the cultural war on behalf of the Right to Life and it inspired other groups that would follow such as The Christian Coalition. Reverend Falwell died in 2007 of a heart attack. He was 73.
