By Bill Fancher, Rusty Pugh, and Jody Brown
January 21, 2003

(AgapePress) - The largest pro-life group in America is preparing to "out" a contingent of pro-abortion Catholic U.S. senators it says comprise "the deadly dozen."

Many of the leading abortion advocates in Congress are Catholics. That has caused the Vatican to issue a letter of guidelines for Catholic office-holders, re-emphasizing the church's stance on abortion. Catholic activist Judie Brown of American Life League (ALL) has been calling for such action by the church leaders for years.

"There are far too many people in politics right now who call themselves Catholic who will say that that is just an opinion," Brown says. "If the [Catholic] bishops don't stand up and say that there is no excuse for any Catholic politician to favor abortion, then these guidelines [from the Vatican] are going to end up in the wastebasket."

According to Brown, the bishops have one main action they can take: deny those politicians access to the sacraments. "No Catholic politician who publicly is in favor of killing children should ever be given the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist -- ever," she says.

Brown plans to hold a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington on Wednesday morning to expose the pro-abortion Catholic members of the Senate, a group she has dubbed "the deadly dozen." The announcement will unveil the first phase of a three-part ad campaign.

According to a press release from ALL, the ad will feature Democratic Senator John Kerry, a 2004 presidential hopeful, who recently stated that while he claims to have "respect for the words and teachings of the Vatican," he cannot be "limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual, or obligation."

Brown's reaction? "Kerry's flagrant disregard for and disrespectful attitude towards the sacred teachings of his own church are precisely the reasons abortion was ever allowed to be legalized in the first place," she says.

She says that John F. Kennedy set a "deadly precedent" during his presidency when he failed to apply the moral teachings of the Catholic Church to his own decision-making process. "His legacy is the current culture of death perpetuated by his own brother [Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts], by Kerry, and the other ten members of the Senate Deadly Dozen," Brown says.

An Oxymoronic Group
About a hundred members of Rock for Life -- a youth division of American Life League -- marched yesterday outside the Washington office of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC). The director of Rock for Life says any group that condones the killing of innocent life is not reading the Bible.

Carlton Veazey of the RCRC has hailed Roe v. Wade as "one of the great decisions of the Supreme Court." And his group is planning a church event on Wednesday called "From Generation to Generation: Celebrating 30 Years of Faithful Reproductive Choices."

But in an Associated Press report, Rock for Life president Bryan Kemper says Veazey's coalition deceives young people into believing that Christians can support abortion. He calls that unbiblical and an oxymoron.

"I believe the Bible is very clear that God is pro-life, that He is the creator of every single human person, and that no one has a right to take an innocent human life," Kemper says. "What they are doing, it's not following God -- it may be a false spirituality or a false god."

The RCRC discounts several Bible passages that conservative Christians believe demonstrate God's knowledge and recognition of unborn babies as individuals. The group says Psalm 139 -- specifically verses 13, 15, and 16 -- does not deal with abortion, but is "a poetic way of celebrating God's love for people."

Similarly, the group says Jeremiah 1:5 is not a "rational discourse" on how God creates people or "whether every fetus should be counted as a person."

The Bible, according to the RCRC, places full responsibility for procreation in the hands of the parents. In that light, the group states that requiring a woman to complete a pregnancy against her will "devalues" motherhood.

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