Well-Funded? Yeah, Right

Yesterday’s post about Sally Jacobson, the professor/vandal at Northern Kentucky University, noted that she had recently issued an apology for leading her students in destroying a pro-life display last week. I made the comment yesterday that apologizing was a smart move on her part.

However, since she stated her regret for what she called a “mistake in judgment,” she has continued to make mistakes in judgment.

In an e-mail she sent to the students she led in vandalizing the pro-life display, published in the school paper, she said:

If you are named, my advice is to get your attorney to plead you down to a misdemeanor. The well-funded Right to Life groups that are pushing for this need felony convictions, I believe, in order to file civil suits for damages. [Emphasis added.]

She went on to say:

In the meantime, the campus police continue their investigation. If you have not yet been interrogated, you do not have to talk to them without an attorney. You can make it hard to find you. [Emphasis added.]

Is it just me, or does her advice border on interfering with an investigation?

I’ll let those who are more schooled in the law debate this question, but I want to focus on her remark about “well-funded Right to Life groups”.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but the only pro-life group I know of that’s directly involved in this matter is Northern Kentucky Right to Life, the student group that set up the display. I’m assuming that the group’s funding comes exclusively from the school. I’m also assuming that the amount of money the school allocates to NKRTL is comparable to that given to other groups on campus.

Jacobson’s remark particularly struck me because I had never before seen the terms “well-funded” and “right to life group” appear in the same sentence.

It’s especially ironic considering that most pro-life groups nationwide operate on a shoestring, and subsist largely on relatively small donations from those without a great deal of disposable income to begin with. Very few have many — if any at all — full-time employees, and those that do often can’t even afford to provide health insurance for them. Were it not for prayer support, many of these groups probably wouldn’t even be able to make payroll.

The pro-life movement in this country consists almost entirely of part-time employees and — to a far greater extent — volunteers. This is especially true of pregnancy resource centers (at around 4000, they outnumber abortion clinics by about 5 to 1) — some of which are staffed exclusively by volunteers.

Comparatively speaking, the “pro-choice” movement is extraordinarily well-funded. When Dr. Brian Clowes of Human Life International spoke to a gathering of pro-lifers in Chicago a few years ago, I recall his estimating that the combined budgets of the major “pro-choice” organizations in this country — Planned Parenthood, NARAL, NOW, et al. — were twenty times greater than those of their pro-life counterparts. (I haven’t done the math on this myself, but this information could be easily checked out, as all non-profit organizations’ 990 forms are matters of public record.)

Would that “well-funded right to life groups” didn’t exist merely in Jacobson’s imagination!

Still, recalling the story of David & Goliath, we need not despair. Instead, we press on.

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