Lizz Winstead, comedienne and The Daily Show co-creator, now full-time abortion advocate as founder and director of Lady Parts Justice League, called for “shame on the media” Friday for not covering the January 18 March for Life.
Why weren’t they reporting on the “thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have descended on Washington,” she asked in a video tweeted out with #OperationSaveAbortion, while she and four comrades were embedded along the march route. She called out “my progressive brothers and sisters” and declared “shame on the activists” in town for the Women’s March (to be held the next day) for not coming out to “be a voice against” the “incredible” number of pro-life marchers.
This may be one time I agree with Winstead. The number of pro-lifers that turn out each year is astronomical. The media, shamefully, acts as if they are invisible. We’re not talking just thousands but hundreds of thousands of Americans who come to our capital and march peacefully to protest the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which stripped legal protection from the unborn. This year, 100,000 were expected, but estimates have been up to 300,000.
As usual, coverage was scarce to non-existent.
The major media won’t report on the March for Life because it is afraid to reveal how many people attend, and how overwhelmingly young, joyful, and well-behaved they are. It contradicts their narrative of pro-lifers as backwards religious fanatics who are anti-woman. Winstead, on the other hand, wants people to be afraid, so that they will be motivated to come join her in abortion activism.
I can understand why Lizz was feeing lonely. The day before the March, our paths crossed when she and only half a dozen others held signs and yelled that pro-lifers were hypocrites (they call this "sidewalk counseling") outside the Renaissance hotel in downtown D.C., as thousands of us arrived to attend the March for Life Conference and Expo.
We were at the same location again on the day of the March itself, outside the Supreme Court. Every year, women (and men) from the Silent No More Awareness Network stand at the steps of the Supreme Court and give testimony about why they regret their abortions. Pro-abortion activists also meet there to make a lot of noise in an attempt to drown out the prolife speakers. When I got there, a woman tagging along with Lizz was shouting into her bullhorn, “I don’t regret my abortion, and I’d do it again,” over and over, marching in a circle. I went to greet the Silent No More group and stayed for a while to help protect their speaking space from encroachers. It wasn’t pretty: one-woman asked a man if the sign he held saying he regretted “lost fatherhood” was a reference to masturbation; a woman in a nutty condom costume offered us some because “condoms prevent abortion;” another pointed to us and screamed “they hate sex!” When Janet Morana, co-founder of Silent No More, asked people to remember the women harmed or killed in legal abortions the protestors shouted over her that she was lying, and then that she was “uneducated.”
If ever there was a clear display of the contrast between the conduct of pro-lifers versus abortion activists, this was it. What Lizz Winstead doesn’t seem to understand is that most decent Americans wouldn’t want to join her in these actions. It takes a certain kind of angry activist to scream at people who are exercising their rights as Americans to peacefully protest. It takes angry and scared radical abortion supporters to encourage people to have abortions and then “shout your abortion” and celebrate. It takes hard-hearted people to shout over a woman who is courageously sharing her painful lived experience in the hope that her witness might save lives.
This is what I saw at the March for Life: ordinary people going out of their way to thank the D.C. police officers for doing their jobs; older people walking the route in the cold with canes and walkers; thousands of fresh young teens; families with babies and toddlers in strollers; clergy from many denominations, and lots of creative signs, including those declaring that feminism has to start with protecting baby girls in the womb.
A few more angry abortion activists on the streets won’t change anything, Lizz, sorry. The media knows this; it’s why they refuse to honestly report the marvelous number of pro-lifers who show up each year at the March for Life. But boy do I wish they would take your advice and cover it!
Maria McFadden Maffucci is the editor of the Human Life Review, www.humanlifereview.com, a quarterly journal devoted to the defense of human life, founded in 1974 by her father, James P. McFadden, Associate Publisher of National Review. She is President of the Human Life Foundation, based in midtown Manhattan, which publishes the Review and supports pregnancy resource centers. Mrs. Maffucci’s articles and editorials have appeared in the Human Life Review, First Things, National Review Online, National Review, Verily, and Crux. A Holy Cross graduate with a BA in Philosophy, she is married to Robert E. Maffucci, and the mother of three children. Her interests include exploring opportunities for individuals with special needs. To read more of her reports — Click Here Now.
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