Roe Vs. Wade Anniversary Marked

Patrick J. Buchanan called on Congress on Saturday to recognize the unborn as human beings, while other abortion opponents around the country marked the weekend anniversary of Roe vs. Wade with protests.

Smaller numbers of abortion-rights activists also demonstrated, and both sides vowed to keep fighting.

“We will be doing it as we are today, in a peaceful nonviolent manner,” Deborah Bian-Lingle, president of South Carolina Citizens for Life, told about 2,500 demonstrators outside the Statehouse in Columbia, S.C. “We will never, never, never give up.”

Buchanan, the 1992 Republican presidential hopeful, told cheering members of the New Hampshire Right to Life Committee in Concord, N.H., that Congress must “confer personhood on the unborn so their rights will be protected.”

The former communications director for President Ronald Reagan said that in addition to the GOP’s “contract with America,” the Republican-controlled Congress should adopt “a new contract with America’s unborn.”

Buchanan also called for term limits on “the black-robed politicians called federal judges and justices.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Roe vs. Wade case on Jan. 22, 1973, gave women the right to have an abortion.

Buchanan condemned last month’s killing of two abortion clinic workers in Massachusetts as “despicable and cowardly.”

At an anti-abortion rally in Lincoln, Neb., state Sen. John Lindsay said that abortion clinic violence should be condemned “because it diverts attention from the violence inside the clinic.”

In Denver, a small group of abortion-rights advocates carried signs protesting the clinic killings as they stood on the fringes of a crowd of abortion opponents on the steps of the state Capitol.

“We all have one common purpose as far as abortion goes, and that is to stop it before it destroys us all,” said Al Clements, executive director of the Texas Right to Life Committee, at a rally in Austin.