I just wanted to offer a couple of thoughts after participating in the Planned Parenthood Clinic rally and march in Houston yesterday.
• Don’t believe anything you read in the newspaper (even online). You’ve heard this before, of course, but it’s true that if you attend an event and then read about it in the media, you will find a very different story than the one you witnessed. The Houston Chronicle began running an article several hours into the rally, and was consistently behind the story, behind on the numbers, and biased toward Planned Parenthood’s side. In fact their first version had assertions from Planned Parenthood about the nature of the clinic that were substantially revised in later versions of the same story after the Chronicle had obviously talked to PP. The revisions actually revealed more of what the clinic will really be all about. PP claims that only two floors will be used for clinical space. However, if you’ve seen the building, you know that the floors are stepped. If the first two floors are the clinic space (likely) then probably half of the 78,000 square feet will be devoted to abortions.
The best article I’ve found was (naturally) the one in World magazine.
• The Chronicle consistently used the word ‘thousands’ to describe the march. Technically, of course, this is true. But it makes you think of two or three thousand. World reported ten thousand, which was also my on-the-spot estimate. I’ve yet to see a report from the organizers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was higher.
• The Chronicle repeatedly emphasized that people had come ‘from all over the country.’ I’m sure many had, but the way they reported it gave the impression that this was not a local movement, but some kind of national invasion of wackos. To the contrary – almost everyone I talked to had come from the Houston area.
• The Chronicle emphasized the protest, but the focus was prayer. In fact the highlight of the march for me was the time our group (about 3000?) spent in the Macy’s warehouse parking lot across the highway from the clinic, praying in almost perfect silence. That’s what it was all about.
• The Chronicle story received hundreds of comments, many of them from liberal supporters of abortion, who immediately and persistently began labeling the protestors as ‘fanatics,’ ‘underemployed,’ ‘self-rightgeous (sic),’ ‘wing-nut’, etc. But honestly the lack of information on both sides of the comments is enough to make one wish the comment capability didn’t exist at all.
• A persistent theme in the pro-abortion comments was that pro-lifers ought to do something to help, and that these aborted babies were better off dead than being raised by a mother who didn’t want them. But one of the great miracles of the pro-life movement has been the Crisis Pregnancy network, which through counsel and the impact of ultra-sounds has saved some huge number of babies. A more recent miracle still coming to fruition has been the huge willingness on the part of pro-life families to adopt these unwanted children. As my (adopted) daughter Tina wrote on facebook ‘I am a living example that the abortion clinics are wrong!’
