Can It Work?

I once read that when Alfred Sloan was the head of General Motors, he had a plan for using some of the company’s stock in a way that would significantly increase its value.

He called the board of directors together and ordered the head of his legal department to produce a report on how this stock transaction could be done legally. A short time later, the man issued a report advising the board that the plan was illegal. Immediately, Sloan fired him, pointing out that his assignment was not to tell the board whether this plan was legal or not, his assignment was to tell them how it could be done legally. Apparently, the next head of the legal department was paying attention since he was able to provide a report detailing exactly how the plan could be legally implemented.

I don’t know whether this story is true or not, but the principle behind it is unassailable. What it means is that if someone is looking for ways the plan I am proposing here cannot succeed, they will surely find them. If they are looking for how to make it succeed, they may find that as well. We just need to remember that the pro-life movement has always had its share of oracles, gurus, wizards, soothsayers and pundits who can be counted on to tell the rest of us – with crystal clarity and arrogant certainty – what can and cannot be done. They do this despite the fact that history is teeming with examples of new ideas being ridiculed and dismissed as impossible, right up to the moment they succeeded.

With that in mind, I fully expect that what I propose here will quickly be shot full of holes, and there is no doubt that some of those criticisms will have merit. But at the same time, it is dangerous to blindly accept as gospel the opinions of experts simply because they are experts. The trick is to take the council of the wise, while never forgetting that amateurs built Noah’s Ark and experts built the Titanic.

One thing I know for certain is that the most effective way to guarantee our failure is to wait around for a plan to come along that we all agree cannot fail. Another thing I know is that it is time for us to do whatever it takes to end this senseless slaughter. In Texas we have a saying: if you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. Well, what we’ve got is over 60 million dead babies with another 3,000 being added every day. And if we don’t change, then we had better be prepared for another 60 million, and another 60 million, and…

In The Final Analysis

I have always believed that fortune favors those who are bold, innovative, and impatient. Ironically, a textbook example of this concept can be seen in the way abortion was legalized in the first place.

In the early 1970s, two unknown twenty-something attorneys, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee – both relatively fresh out of law school and with little or no courtroom experience – set out to make abortion-on-demand legal nationwide through all nine months of pregnancy. Toward that goal, they took a case they knew was based on a fraudulent rape claim by a client with a very blemished past, and filed it in a venue that would pit them against the most powerful district attorney in one of the most conservative states in the country. They also had to buck public opinion that was strongly opposed to legalizing abortion. In fact, the only reason this issue ended up in the court system to begin with is because the abortion lobby had seen their agenda repeatedly and soundly defeated in the political system. The courts were their last hope.

Given that environment, if the abortion lobby’s oracles, gurus, wizards, soothsayers and pundits were consulted about Roe vs. Wade before it was filed, there can be little doubt that they sneered at it. It is also safe to assume that Weddington and Coffee were told more than once that this was not the right case; this was not the right client; this was not the right venue; this was not the right time; they were not the right attorneys; their legal theory was fatally flawed; and when they lost they were going to set the abortion-rights movement back years, if not destroy it altogether. But they went forward anyway, and when the dust settled America had what is still to this day the most liberal abortion policy in the industrialized world. In a nutshell, the American holocaust started because a couple of lawyers were not smart enough to know that what they wanted to do was impossible. So they just went out and did it.

Maybe there is a message in that for the pro-life movement.