We can sympathize with the unborn child

California Catholic Daily - “We can sympathize with the unborn child”

We can sympathize with the unborn child”

Pro-life movement finds support from an unlikely quarter

Steve Cook of San Jose, like most California pro-life advocates, is not surprised when he and his anti-abortion posters attract verbal abuse. After all, "pro-choicers" on the Left Coast have a reputation for intolerance. But after over 25 years of marching, picketing, and speaking out for the unborn, what really hurts, he says, is people screaming, "Traitor!" "Shame!"

This is because Steve represents a group that the Left never expected to find on the anti-abortion side: the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians.

Like most pro-lifers, Cook is convinced that any abortion of any unborn child is murder. But he has another reason to be uneasy with the ideology of "choice". “If prenatal tests could detect a tendency toward homosexuality in the unborn, some mothers would abort their babies because they did not ‘choose’ to have a gay son or daughter,” he explains.

Asks Cook, "Would gay abortion advocates say, ‘OK, it's your choice: go ahead and wipe us out?’

"I was on a medical ethics committee connected to an Episcopal Church," recalled Cook in a phone interview with California Catholic Daily, "and I was amazed at people who said that infants are ‘not necessarily' human beings. I said, 'They're different from you, and maybe you don't want them, but that doesn't make them less human.'

“Yet the gay and lesbian community itself is divided,” said Cook. “Not all gays are against aborting ‘gay’ babies. In the UK in the 1980s [famous British cross-dresser and gay activist] Quentin Crisp told me he’d had a life of rejection and wished he had been aborted.”

The Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians was founded in 1991 in Washington, D.C. by Tom Sena and Joe Beard, an attorney who had donated many hours of pro-bono work to pro-life organizations. But they have not always been accepted as allies by the pro-life movement.

Five years ago, two Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians members were arrested for parading without a permit when Nellie Gray, the permit holder for the annual March for Life, denied self-identified “gay” groups permission to participate. Miss Gray subsequently became convinced that the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians was genuinely pro-life and not "some kind of counter-protest." She changed her policy and the group has marched openly with their banners and posters in every March for Life rally since 2002.

Cook, who participated in the second-annual Walk for Life West Coast in San Francisco last winter, explained to California Catholic Daily, “I’m against the Darwinian view of evolution which states that only the ‘reproductively successful’ or the ‘fittest’ should survive. Human life should be protected at all stages and in all its forms.”

“As gays and lesbians, we are unwanted by society,” noted Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians president Cecilia Brown in an interview with BustedHalo.com, “so we can sympathize with the unborn child, who is not wanted.”

With 900 members in half a dozen cities, the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians has set up pro-life displays at Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender gatherings, leafleted parades, and published articles against abortion in alternative as well as mainstream publications.

As one member noted to BustedHalo.com, conservative pro-lifers are increasingly approaching them and saying that though they don’t agree with them on everything, they are happy the group is there.

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