Some drivers were shocked when iconically liberal San Francisco’s Market Street thoroughfare was closed for hours last year on Jan. 26. The blockage wasn’t due to a sudden water-main break but an entirely foreseeable scheduled rally, with tens of thousands of marchers.
Friendly city police were stationed along the route, nearly two miles long, to make sure everything moved along smoothly.
“Every year the Walk for Life West Coast is here,” said Eva Muntean, one of the founders of the event that turns 10 this year. “We are one of the largest annual events in San Francisco. And every year we hear the same thing – ‘I’m shocked,’ ‘I ran into this absolutely enormous anti-abortion march,’ ‘I never heard of this!’ — those are actual quotes. They don’t know and they are shocked because the media is not doing its job.”
A man at an online message board said he hadn’t known anything about the march and was stuck in traffic for two hours, Muntean said, asking, “Well, why didn’t he know?”
Dolores Meehan, the walk’s other co-founder, added, “You can avoid the truth, but you can’t avoid the traffic!”
The march (www.walkforlifewc.com) is on a Saturday, so it doesn’t intrude on business commuters. The event reflects the right of the people to assemble to petition the government, whether for civil rights, environmental concerns, or even the right to life.
One of the speakers scheduled for this year’s Jan. 25 rally, 28-year-old Monica Snyder, from Sacramento, represents an organization named Secular Pro-Life, whose members don’t belong to organized religion.
Synder, who majored in chemical biology at the University of California-Berkeley and is working on a Master’s degree at UC-Davis, told the Daily Independent in a Jan. 17 interview, “Why do you have to be religious to understand biology?… It doesn’t matter what you believe” about religion in order to know the scientific facts about prenatal development.
She may have been referring to the template often employed in media coverage that opposition to permissive abortion is based only on religious notions. However, when one sees squirming, smiling babies in ultrasound images, one sees living facts, not rosaries or Torah scrolls.
Although the majority of these San Francisco marchers aren’t atheists or agnostics, there’s plenty of room for them, too.
The message Snyder wants to get across, she said, “is that pro-life is for everybody… Men, women, people of any race, political affiliation,” religious attitude, or any other category.
Snyder said she honed her comprehension of the issue by debating it online. “I came to have a much better understanding… I’ve come to a more nuanced [attitude]… I don’t think pro-choicers are evil… I think we talk past each other a lot.”
This year’s Walk for Life West Coast is scheduled to start with an hour of talks at 12:30 p.m. in front of San Francisco’s blue-and-gold-domed City Hall, then walkers should stretch from curb to curb down Market Street to the Ferry Building on the bay. The 2013 crowd was estimated at 50,000 to 60,000 pro-lifers, marching down Market for more than two hours. Even more are expected this year.
And that’s only a fraction of the more than half-million people expected at the national March for Life on Jan. 22 in Washington, D.C. What amounts to a full-sized city on the march gets at best seconds in national television news, and, routinely, no individual stories or faces.
Washington, however, is hours on the airplane and a continent away from Californians. In 2005, they started their own Bay area march and have grown every year. In 2013, San Diegans held their first march, drawing about 3,000 people.
Although most people at Walk for Life West Coast are Californians, other Western states are represented, too.
Each march — and many others across the country, including Phoenix and Tucson — addresses the U.S. Supreme Court’s unsupportable invention of a supposed basic constitutional right to permissive abortion on Jan. 22, 1973.
Overnight, the court overturned the abortion laws of all 50 states, from the most restrictive to the most permissive. Somehow, every legislator and judge throughout the nation’s history had failed to discover the basic abortion right that the high court suddenly imposed.
That the “mainstream” media give so little attention to the strength and size of the opposition to the court’s invention could suggest the media fear that the imposition might wither and blow away upon sustained inspection.
Supreme Court judges, who never even saw an ultrasound image because today’s technology hadn’t been developed, announced that the Constitution actually laid down detailed rules requiring abortion, even though the court wasn’t sure just where this right was in the document.
Last year, “Abuse of Discretion” was published, a book written by attorney Clarke Forsythe and based on the justices’ own notes from that era, showing they didn’t use factual or evidentiary records but preferred unproven speculation and loose assertions by abortion activists. Forsythe is senior legal counsel of the Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Life.
Ten years after the original decisions in 1973, Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton, one of the justices, Lewis Powell, told his judicial brother William Brennan that he thought they agreed that abortion abuses had emerged, and “that abortion mills do exist, and are operated to the great profit of unethical physicians who care little about their patients.” Although Powell put this admission into his draft of a 1983 abortion opinion, two other justices persuaded him to remove it from the final version because the candid observation would give abortion a bad name.
As for the victimized patients at the greatly profitable abortion mills, the Supreme Court at best whispered to itself, Can’t afford to let this bad news get out.
Too bad, too, for San Francisco-area drivers who might like some warning of the street closures they should expect year after year, another effect of the court’s invention echoing down the decades.
In 2013, the liberal San Francisco Chronicle put its coverage of the Walk for Life West Coast back on Page C-12, behind two pages of weather maps and four pages of obituaries. Under the headline “40 years later, both sides on abortion remain at odds,” the Chronicle portrayed the event as both sides of the issue coming out to demonstrate.
Although the slant was to imply some kind of parity, only a few hundred champions of abortion had gathered on Market Street to taunt the marchers.
In 2012, when an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 pro-lifers demonstrated right down the city’s main drag, the San Francisco Chronicle printed no story at all but ran a modest two-column photo on Page C-3 with a caption saying “thousands” of abortion foes took part.
A few days before the 2012 event, Chronicle columnist C. W. Nevius telegraphed what his paper would do about covering, or not covering, the pro-lifers. He wrote: “The best approach, of course, would be to let them have their moment, ignore them, and then go back to real life in San Francisco.”
Speaking at the 2012 rally, former abortionist Vansen Wong, M.D., from Sacramento, said he did hundreds of abortions as a way to make “easy money” while he was pursuing a medical degree, but now he regrets “the destruction of every precious life…
“Abortion is barbaric. Abortion is intolerable… and abortion has no place in any civilized society,” Wong concluded his remarks.
One might wonder if the Chronicle and its media kin would prefer that the Vansen Wongs of today continue to make their errors rather than change their ways.
As for Bay area drivers, better pack a picnic lunch for Jan. 25 when you surprisingly find you’re not going anywhere for a while.