A Symbiotic Friendship
Baird, who ran an abortion facility that was firebombed and who stamped his name on the Supreme Court decision that laid the groundwork for Roe vs.Wade, spent the noon hour carrying a sign that says, “Abortion is a Woman's Right” outside the convention hotel in Pittsburgh.
Pavone, who is Father Frank Pavone, head of Priests for Life, stepped outside just before the rain came, gathered up his old nemesis, and took him upstairs where they disagreed agreeably on everything including the menu.
“I'm not in agreement with his eating a hamburger,” Baird said. “Beef is full of hormones.”
At 70, Baird sports a mane of brownish-gray hair and the physique of a 40-year-old health food enthusiast. At 43, Pavone sports a Roman collar and an ability to listen patiently to a man who has gone so far as to picket Catholic churches and protest the installation of the late John Cardinal O'Connor.
As the two men and their retinue sat down to lunch — Baird, acting on reflex insisted on a seat facing the entrance — a clap of thunder and a streak of lightning filled the sky.
“Missed me,” Baird said, looking upward.
He and Pavone struck up a symbiotic friendship a few years back. Baird, an outcast in his own movement and largely derided as a self-promoter by pro-abortion feminist leaders despite his long activism for abortion, attends the National Right to Life convention annually. He pays the registration fee, registers as a guest in the convention hotel so he can't be kicked out, and, a few years ago, some National Right to Life Committee members went so far as to send him a get-well card when he was ailing.
“So, Frank, I'm fascinated. I want to know what trouble you're in for associating with the devil today,” Baird said.
Dialogue With Evil?
Pavone told the story of a donor to Priests for Life who wrote in to announce he would no longer contribute “because you dialogue with evil.”
“I wrote back and said, 'I do not dialogue with evil. I dialogue with persons and Bill is a person.”
“And on the flip side, people say what am I doing with this guy?” said Baird.
What they are doing together is developing a sort of Geneva Convention for the abortion debate. Each has become alarmed at violence directed against abortion facilities and Baird recently began to worry openly that abortion advocates would unleash violence against the other side.
Yesterday, Baird released a copy of a joint statement he and Pavone drafted calling on both sides to tone down rhetoric they worry has become the first step toward abortion violence.
“Respectful dialogue, while not expecting either party to compromise his or her beliefs, can lessen or stop dangerous, dehumanizing assumptions about those on the opposite side of this issue,” the statement reads. “We believe that regular meetings, including social ones, between opposing sides should be conducted at least once a month to encourage people to form civil relationships.”
Human Freedom
Both men hope the statement will ramp down the hostility across the abortion divide. Whether it will lessen hostility between those who agree on abortion is another thing.
Already, Pavone has been likened to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who tried to appeases Hitler, by extremists who claim to oppose abortion then advocate shooting abortion practitioners. Baird admits he is estranged from every major abortion rights group and feminist Betty Friedan has gone so far as to suggest he is a CIA agent.
“There are people that, if they saw Frank with me, they'd beat us both up,” Baird said.
Each man sees faults within his own movement. Pavone has been alarmed at violence against abortion facilities and last year put up a $50,000 reward for information that would lead to the conviction of anyone shooting an abortion practitioner.
Baird blames other pro-abortion groups for losing their natural allies, including the widely publicized defection of Norma McCorvey, the Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade. McCorvey joined the pro-life movement and later converted to Roman Catholicism.
Neither man has illusions about converting the other. “Make no doubt about it,” Baird said. “We are fighters, he and I.”
Pavone describes his work as a variant of what Baird was doing. Baird campaigned against laws restricting birth control and abortion, viewing them as a broadening of civil rights.
“My goal is to see an expansion of that — human freedom recognized for all human beings. The moment has arrived to take it to the next level for unborn children.”
At that point, of course, an argument erupted. A very civil one.
(This article courtesy of Steven Ertelt and the Pro-Life Infonet email newsletter. For more information or to subscribe go to www.prolifeinfo.org or email infonet@prolifeinfo.org.)
