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By Dennis Howard
Fifty-four million abortions are an unforgivable waste of human lives. And yet, for lack of a broad moral consensus, the banal evil of abortion continues.
Currently, the number of abortions is declining by about 1% a year, which simply reflects a 1% a year decline in births 30 years ago. Fewer births then, fewer abortions now. Real progress in the fight against abortion remains agonizingly slow.
One reason for this lack of progress is that we have yet to build a genuine pro-life majority. Until we do, any realistic hope for ending abortion is remote.
Unfortunately, America is deeply divided with a loud vocal minority on the left, a great many people in the "mushy middle" (with values drawn from Hollywood and Madison Avenue) and a wide variety of conservatives on the right -- from staunchly religious to secular libertarian.
Building a pro-life majority in such an environment is a formidable task. If your views are faith-based, they are often dismissed out of hand. That's why we need to find common ground with movements like the Tea Party based on a shared faith in freedom and personal responsibility.
Unfortunately, the pro-life movement itself is made up of literally thousands of groups all over the country, plus a core group of national organizations with varied agendas. As a result, pro-life unity and solidarity are often at a premium except on that one big day each year -- the March for Life in Washington. Every day is a new test of e pluribus unum -- unity out of many.
From the beginning, we at the Movement for a Better America have sought common ground by appealing to themes that affect the vast majority of Americans -- regardless of their politics, or even their moral and religious views. Whatever our beliefs, we are all profoundly affected by realities like the economic and other consequences of abortion.
We were the first to warn of a coming economic crisis and to foresee that it could last from 2000 through 2010 and even 2020. Now we see that it could last even longer. Yet few economists acknowledge the devastating impact of 54 million abortions and a 43% decline in birth rates since 1960. They'd rather talk about consequences -- like jobs, interest rates and taxes -- than fundamental causes.
Our original Campaign for Life ads sought to raise the economic impact of abortion to the level of a national issue. Some pro-life critics dismissed them by telling us that "no one ever voted based on the economic impact of abortion." Thank God, the ads proved them wrong.
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