Pro-life action speaks louder than words, lawsuits
The 12th station was missing. The station wasn’t originally a
part of the woodwork set of the Stations of the Cross that adorn
the wall of St. Joseph Chapel, the newest addition to the offices
of the Pro-Life Action League (PLAL).
A crucifix hung in its absence, said Joseph Scheidler, clearly
proud of this visible sign of the spiritual nature of the work
he describes as a “vocation.”
Last week, a league member discovered the missing station at a
religious goods store.
“We prayed to St. Anthony and we found it,” he said.
The role of prayer is important to Scheidler, the head of the
PLAL, a group that has crusaded against abortion since 1980.
When Scheidler isn’t grasping a bullhorn, or a picket sign that
accurately—and graphically—displays the mangled, aborted unborn
child, or rosary beads in prayer, he spends his “spare time” at
work on the chapel. His latest project has been designing and
fitting the chapel’s windows.
“I think everyone named Joseph takes up carpentry,” he joked.
But how much spare time does Scheidler have?
“None,” he said.
Since 1994, the Scheidlers, Joseph, and wife, Ann, have weathered
the effects of a Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act
(RICO) lawsuit filed by the National Organization for Women (NOW)
against this father of seven.
Refusing to settle out of court with NOW has forced the Scheidlers
to use their house as collateral in securing an appeal bond.
The case is just another twist on the straight narrow path these
Catholics have demonstrated along for almost 30 years.
As the Scheidlers prepared to join countless Catholics and other
pro-life advocates in Washington for the annual March for Life
on Jan. 22 to protest the 1973 ruling by the Supreme Court that
paved the way for legalized abortion in the United States, the
couple talked about how their work in the pro-life movement has
shaped their lives.
During the decades, Joseph has been a part of three different
organizations. They include: the Chicago Office for Pro-Life Publicity
(one year); Illinois Right to Life Committee, director (three
years); and Friends for Life (two years).
Frustrated by the demands of answering to boards of directors,
he founded PLAL.
“You have to be able to work quickly in this movement,” he said,
sitting in the organization’s North Side offices. “I have to be
able to get on the phone and get my troops together to show up
for an event.”
Besides, he added, “people on boards care about maintaining an
image. I don’t care about image that much.”
What image do the Scheidlers care about?
“If there are three stations—ABC, NBC, and CBS, and I’m on two
of them and not the third, the one that bothers me is the one
I’m not on because people need to see that someone is out there
aggressively fighting abortion. He added, “Those are the people
I’m interested in encouraging,” he said.
While they have recently reclaimed their 12th station, the Scheidlers
have never lost sight of constructing a nation where others live
out the fifth commandment.
“If your decision is about abortion, I can make it for you: ‘Don’t
have one.’”
The Catholic New World: At times we hear that politicians are
against abortion, except when it is performed to “save the life
of the mother.” Do those instances occur, or does that just exist
in theory?
Joseph Scheidler: It just exists in theory. It is a good arguing point. What is
the occasion? What is the situation where a woman dies because
she is pregnant? She may need assistance. She may have a condition
that may have to be balanced with medication. She may even have
to have a … cesarean section delivery. There are situations that
aren’t necessarily the best but you don’t have to have abortion
to save the life of the mother. That’s fiction. Unless you have
cancer advancing in the uterus or something where you have to
do surgery to save the mother’s life and the consequence is that
the pregnancy is in danger, but you don’t have to abort. The way
it’s talked about is that it’s healthy to have an abortion. It
is disastrous to have an abortion.
Our society is very, very ill-informed on what abortion is, how
it is done, when it’s done, why it’s done. Most abortions are
simply done out of convenience.
We go down to Albany Clinic up the street every Thursday and every
Saturday. The girls going in there aren’t having abortions to
save their lives. They are having them to save there reputations.
Or to save some money. That’s unfortunate.
I don’t accept abortion for any reason. Never will.
TCNW: Some pro-lifers have expressed their want of someone else
to speak out in the media against abortion. Privately people note
that you [Joseph Scheidler] aren’t a woman, you’re not a doctor
…
JS: Who are these people, I’ll picket their homes. (Laughs.)
Ann Scheidler: There is definitely a stream of pro-lifers who think that a woman
should be the only one to talk about it [abortion] or that it
is more persuasive since some feminists have framed it as a woman’s
issue, a woman should be the one to answer their objections. But
its clear that the women’s movement is not standing up for women
because of their strong support for abortion.
TCNW: When you started in this vocation nearly 30 years ago, did
you ever think you would have to put your home up for an appeal
bond?
JS: I don’t think we thought that. For one, we thought our house
was safe because we had it in my daughter’s name. But we came
to a decision where we had to give it to the bank so that we could
come up with almost $400,000 to start our appeal.
AS: We do expect to get it back.
JS: But we may not. It is very possible since only one out of nine
appeals are won. And that would send us to the Supreme Court.
But that’s not the thing that determines what you do. Is it right
to have a nation support abortion? And the answer is no. “Thou
shall not kill” is not a suggestion. It’s a commandment. We have
to fight abortion. We have to. I don’t have any choice.
TCNW: Catholics are called to stand against abortion. But do you
have to lose your house over it?
JS: If you are effective enough, if you are causing the abortionists
enough trouble, they will try to stop you. And I take it as a
feather in my cap that they’ve come after us. Apparently we are
part of that movement that has caused over 900 abortionists to
quit doing abortion and caused 500 abortion clinics to shut down,
and has stopped 250,000 abortions in the last years that have
been counted. One way to stop us, they think, is to break us financially.
They can’t put us in jail because we haven’t committed any crimes,
but they can go after us with a RICO, which is kind of a fiction,
and charge us with extortion, which we haven’t done, by changing
the description of extortion to preventing someone else from making
money. And they got us on threats of violence by asking the abortionists,
“Do you feel threatened when Mr. Scheidler’s around?” “Why yes.”
And that’s a threat of violence? That’s a fiction. But it is a
way of saying that we are so much a threat to the abortion culture
that we have to be stopped. That’s a compliment. Recent polls
show the majority of people are against abortion, about 56 percent.
TCNW: Is that encouraging?
JS: Yeah. Because the law is a teacher. When the law said that abortion
is legal, people thought it was finished. The Supreme Court spoke
and that’s supposed to settle things. And it hasn’t. It is going
the other way. And now the [Supreme] Court may change. But even
that won’t settle it because it is matter of conscience. It takes
a conversion.
AS: I really think one of the principal reasons why things are turning
around is because today you have all these women [who’ve had abortions]
who are saying quietly to their daughters, or their nieces, or
their friends that it’s “a terrible mistake” and “don’t do it.”
We talk to them outside the clinics.
TCNW: Have the twists and turns of the RICO case changed you in
any way?
JS: It has made me more confident that what we are doing is right
because they are fighting me. The enemy—the National Organization
for Women—consider me their worst enemy. I just wish they would
make a medal out of it that I could wear because that’s exactly
what I want to be. I want to be the enemy of people who kill children.
TCNW: When the Holy Father visited St. Louis a few years ago,
he called the death penalty “both cruel and unnecessary.” In Cardinal
George’s testimony to an Illinois advisory board on the topic
of a death penalty moratorium, the cardinal stated, “We are called
in Illinois by God’s grace to move beyond vengeance and to end
the cycle of violence.”
There are some in “the pro-life movement” who have different opinions
on the death penalty.
JS: So do a lot of people in the [Catholic] church.
TCNW: Right. Yet the Holy Father is taking a very vocal stand
against capital punishment. I’m wondering, do you see these statements
changing the minds of people—especially Catholics—active in the
pro-life movement?
JS: I think it has changed some.
I see it as a different issue completely. I’m a Thomist and St.
Thomas allows for capital punishment, because when he’s talking
about taking life, he’s talking about the unjust taking of innocent
life which abortion is. Capital punishment is a different issue.
And I think what the Holy Father is seeing is that around the
world there’s a lot of capital punishment that’s not right, that’s
not reasonable, not based on good law or anything else. But you
can not put capital punishment in the same category with abortion
because of that innocent life versus guilty life.
Now, there have been a lot of mistakes made on capital punishment,
and I think Illinois is a good example of that [with] people facing
capital punishment who hadn’t even committed the crime. That’s
just unconscionable. But you still can not put them in the same
category because of the difference between guilt and innocence.
Society has a right to protect itself.
And notice the Holy Father, even when he wants us to set aside
capital punishment, have a moratorium and everything else, he
can never say that it is an absolute evil but abortion is. And
I go by that.
I am not into the capital punishment thing. I have worked against
it. I have worked for people on death row, but I’m not going to
put it in the same category as abortion. I can’t. And neither
can the church.
TCNW: Last week, we ran a story about Helpers’ [of God’s Precious
Infants, a group that organizes prayer vigils outside of abortion
clinics]. But isn’t the reason that they’re here is because you
brought them to Chicago.
Some would contrast your [PLAL] vocation to the work of Helpers’.
Do you view it as a balance of tactics, or more of the same?
JS: Protest is good. Pickets are good. Prayer is good. There are
all kinds of things you can do.
We will go to an abortionist’s home. We’re not there to stop a
girl from having an abortion because she’s not having her abortion
there. But we will picket the abortionist to let the neighbors
know that here is a doctor who took an oath to “do no harm” who
kills children. And we will use bullhorns and pictures and signs
and march around. And then on Saturday we will go to his abortion
mill and pray and counsel and be very low key. There are different
ways to do this. … There are different ways to do different things.
TCNW: What kind of strain does it put on you that the abortion
industry is still in business?
AS: We wouldn’t need to exist if the abortionists were out of business.
We’d be more than happy to put ourselves out of business.
It would be nice not to have to speak at protests or sidewalk
counsel.
There’s plenty of injustice going on everywhere anyway. If we
could solve the abortion problem, there’s child abuse, there’s
domestic abuse, there are plenty of wrongs that need to be righted.
JS: I wish sometimes I had more time for other work like that. There
are kids being abused. It’s outrageous. There was a little kid—a
baby—the other day found burned with cigarettes in the house,
those people [abusers] have to be reached too. But we’re so caught
up in just fighting abortion that there’s not enough time for
other things.
But even if I lose this organization, they’re not going to scare
me out of business. This is my fourth organization. I would still
go on fighting abortion.
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