Reagan Calls Rally to Back Abortion Foes

Encouraged by a telephonic pep talk from President Reagan, several thousand people met in song and prayer Sunday in Westwood to kick off two ministers’ eight-month, 3,400-mile march on Washington that sponsors hope will prompt federal legislation to restrict abortion.

Calling abortion “the most important issue facing this country today,” Reagan, his voice booming from loudspeakers at a hot afternoon rally, told the crowd estimated by police at about 4,000 that it had his support.

“It’s a battle we’re going to win,” he said. He called a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that allows abortion until the 25th week after conception “a tragedy” that should be reversed.

In his five-minute pep talk, Reagan said those at the rally are responsible for awakening “the conscience of a nation.”

“Every bit of evidence” indicates that unborn children, even those not legally protected against abortion, are alive, he said. “You give them, the unborn, a voice and a hope,” he said.

Rally sponsors predicted that they would gather hundreds of thousands of signatures as two Wisconsin ministers trek through 11 major cities in coming months, displaying at each stop preserved fetuses in tiny wooden coffins with brass handles.

With one of the coffins alternately opened and closed, the ministers, Norman Stone and Jerry Horn, posed for photos Sunday. They called the fetus “Baby Choice” and said such demonstrations are necessary.

“Baby Choice is a way of getting past all the old arguments and dealing with the issue itself, which is the termination of life of an unborn child,” Stone said.

Melody Green, director of Texas-based Americans Against Abortion, sponsor of the march, compared abortion to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews and said display of the fetuses is intended to shock the country into action.

“It was a hard decision,” she said, “but I think people need to be aware that there are victims. When they liberated the death camps in Germany, they brought the media in, and we need to do that too.”

Even many physicians do not know what an 18- to 20-week-old fetus like Baby Choice looks like, she said. “They don’t call them babies,” she said. “They use terms like fetal tissue.”

Each day of the year, 4,000 “children” like Baby Choice “are killed” in this country, Green told the large crowd, which at times held hands and prayed together. “I’m hoping the momentum will flow from here like a wave from coast to coast,” she said.

Most anti-abortion groups in the nation have endorsed the march, Green said. They hope that a grass-roots show of opposition to abortion will force Congress to consider a constitutional amendment against it, she said.

After stops in Las Vegas, Denver and Chicago, the pilgrimage is expected to end Feb. 12, 1986, at Slaughter Beach, Del., not far from Washington. Anti-abortion petitions will be presented to the Congress, the Supreme Court and President Reagan, Green said.