ACL Conference Speaker: Paul Mulligan
These are my notes from Paul Mulligan’s speech at the ACL Conference. Parts are paraphrased or directly quoted from his words.
Paul Mulligan is director of the Gabriel Project.
During his time in the Navy, he was stationed at Guam. There he found out that the island went on a yearly March for Life, but sadly that was all they did. There were three abortion clinics but not a single pregnancy care center. Working together with the local pro-life forces and his wife, he built a support network for pregnant women. He also adopted two girls, both of whom would have been aborted had it not been for the support network.
The fruit of abortion is nuclear war, said Mother Teresa. The best way to combat abortion is through prayer. It’s easy to be caught up in a cycle of doing, doing and forgetting about prayer. It’s necessary as a grounding point. The number of abortion reversals brought about by prayers in front of abortion clinics is rising; even if the abortion happens, in the recovery process the mother will know that even though she didn’t necessary love her unborn child at the time, members of the faithful were there, praying and loving; her child did not die alone.
Mr. Mulligan mentioned spiritual adoption.
Another thing to consider is asking how pro-choice advocates approach those women who choose to keep their child. It’s easy to sit around and say that the pregnant women ought to have access to abortion and that no one should approach within 15 feet of her, but can pro-choice people step up and value the women who choose life? If they don’t respect that choice, then they’re not really pro-choice at all and are just pro-abortion.
It is important to support pregnancy care centers. They are staffed by volunteers and unlike Planned Parenthood, they are not out to make a profit. Approach pregnancy care centers and ask what they need for help. Go take a counselor training course and get on the inside and understand what the issues are that single pregnant women are facing. Help out in any way possible.
He mentions learning a one minute pro-life case:
If the unborn is growing, it must be alive. And if it has human parents, it must be human. And living humans, or the human beings like you and I, are valuable aren’t they? Form conception, all that’s added to the unborn is a proper environment and adequate nutrition. But those are the same things all of us need. And not only that. There’s one quality all of us have equally that demands equal treatment: we all have a human nature. Racism and sexism are wrong because they pick out external differences and ignore the underlying similarity between men and women, blacks and whites. And my concern is for your rights as a woman, that you can vindicate them against the will of the majority, but you can only vindicate your rights if you base them on your human nature. But the unborn also has that same human nature, so shouldn’t we protect him from discrimination just as we protect minorities and women?
Pro-abortion advocates would love to identify as pro-life the zealots who bomb abortion clinics; of course, you and I know that those people aren’t pro-life at all, but it is in the interest of the pro-abortion advocates to show pro-life advocates as crazy zealots. In this manner, they can twist the term and thus disavow it of its power.
It is important to get involved and work on pro-life causes; September 11, 2001 was a terrible and defining day. Three thousand people perished people that day. Every day since January 22, 1973, three thousand people perished every day. Abortion is domestic terrorism. Abortion is domestic violence. It does not get any more domestic than a womb.
What happens when Roe v. Wade gets overturned? Abortion goes back to the states. When it goes back to the states, that’s where the fight is going to be. We need to be prepared.