By Jill Stanek -
When word came down the night of January 21 that House GOP leaders were reneging on their promise to hold a vote on the 20-week abortion ban the next day – the haunting 42nd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision – [WARNING: vulgarity alert], I was pissed off to the height of pisstivity. Sorry, that’s the most accurate way I can describe it.
How could GOP leaders have been so careless, cavalier, and apathetic as to let this lowest hanging fruit of a pro-life bill get away from them? How could they have been so cajoneless as to abandon the 20-week ban at the first sign of trouble? And just how low was their respect for the pro-life movement that they would dare to insult us on such a colossal scale?
And then to go silent about the ban for two full months following that debacle?
I’m boiling over again even as I type.
This is the backdrop for my decision to help organize a protest at Speaker Boehner’soffice on March 25. As CNS News reported:
Stanek, a nurse who formerly worked at Christ Hospital in Chicago, became involved in the pro-life movement 16 years ago after she held a live baby who had survived an abortion and was left to die afterwards.
“I’ve been in this movement for 16 years, from the moment I held this little aborted baby, and I’ve never felt convicted to be arrested,” Stanek explained during the protest on Wednesday.
“I’ve always felt my voice was well-heard, speaking and writing,” she said. “But when this bill failed to be brought forward on Jan. 22, I was just so frustrated and disgusted with our Republican House leadership, that they would abandon these babies over political maneuvering.”
“I decided right then and there that I was willing to be arrested on behalf of this little baby that I held, and others like him,” she said.
So, on March 25, alongside several other pro-lifers, I marched to Speaker Boehner’s Longworth Building office to protest the hold-up…
The rest is here.
