Bonnie Finnerty, Education Director, addressing crowd at the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation’s Town Hall tour.
By Maria Gallagher, Legislative Director
Audible gasps filled a meeting room not far from the battlefield of Gettysburg. The assembled crowd was reacting to the news from New York, where pro-abortion Governor Andrew Cuomo had signed a bill allowing abortions up to the moment of birth.
Many in the crowd had come to find out how to prevent Pennsylvania from becoming another New York, as far as the life issues are concerned. They listened attentively, applauded often, and inquired how they could sign a petition to Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, urging him to protect innocent children from harm.
Gettysburg was the first stop in the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation’s popular Town Hall Tour. It will be followed next week with stops in Altoona, Pittsburgh, Erie, Hazleton, and Bethlehem (where pro-abortion Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders recently held his own Town Hall event).
The presentations are jam-packed with important information about promoting life in the culture, in the state Capitol, and in local communities. After the Town Hall in Gettysburg, people crowded around the information table, eager to pick up fact sheets to share with others–especially women facing challenging pregnancies.
We’ve been holding these Town Halls for years now, but there was something especially significant of beginning this year’s tour in Gettysburg. The city is synonymous with defending the soul of the nation–and isn’t that just exactly what pro-lifers are doing today, amidst tremendous challenges from politicians defending late-term abortions and failing to erect legal barriers to infanticide.
In his famous Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln stated that all men are created equal. The pro-life movement believes the same. And because of that dedication to equality, pro-lifers defend life from the very moment of conception to the instant of natural death.
In the immortal words of Lincoln:
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
To learn more about our Town Hall tour, visit www.paprolife.org .