Pro-life Activism
Also central to his work as a professor of biology was the defense of unborn human life.
Prior to the late 1960s, abortion was illegal in every state of the United States, except in cases where the pregnancy posed a risk to the mother's life. This changed in 1967 when Colorado became the first state to legalize abortion in cases of rape, incest, or when there was a threat of permanent disability to the pregnant women. During this period, when the topic of overpopulation first became widely discussed, Filice recalls that not a month would pass when he did not receive, as a biology professor at USF, a free copy of a textbook which called into question population growth. The first such book was The Population Bomb. Dr. Filice found the arguments made in such books unconvincing and began to speak against them at various meetings.
At this time, Filice was invited to participate in a panel discussing concerns over population at a local high school, by a former student of his who was teaching biology. In his observation, the speakers affiliated with Planned Parenthood and the representative of the Human Population Institute of Stanford only talked about how to get an abortion, without addressing the population question at all. This concerned Filice, and, as a result, he called the chancery of the Archdiocese of San Francisco to ask what they were doing to respond. Finding out that they did not have a plan for action, Filice asked if they minded if he tried something. The Chancellor of the Archdiocese told him to go ahead.
Filice had a student, John Martin, who had become a Lutheran, and, when Filice expressed his concern about how things were developing, this student told him that his pastor had expressed the same concerns. As a result, he invited his pastor to have lunch with Filice at USF. Pastor Kangas was pastor of the Finnish Lutheran Church of St. Francis on Church Street in San Francisco. Pastor Kangas was from Ohio and Filice found him to be a very spiritual man.
Filice also invited to the lunch meeting Eileen Ziomeck (now Dr. Aicardi, a pediatrician in San Francisco), who, in Filice's words, was "smartest student I ever had". The four people who attended the luncheon decided to start an educational group aimed at countering the claims regarding population growth made in the media.
Pastor Kangas knew an Episcopalian minister who was of the same mind. He was Rev. Charles Carroll, chaplain at UCSF and pastor of the church that is now the Catholic chapel of St. John of God. Rev. Carroll had been a Catholic, at one time, but now served under the Episcopalian Bishop of San Francisco. His presence on the committee added a socially upscale quality to the movement.
So the four contacted Rev. Carroll and called a meeting. St. Mary’s Hospital let them use a meeting room. No doctors were at the meeting. Those in attendance at this first meeting were: Filice, Eileen Ziomeck, John Martin, John Galten, Clayton Barbeau (a Catholic author), Rev. Bernie Bush, S.J., Rev. Theodore Taheny, S.J., Rev. Carroll, Pastor Kangas, Bob Augros (a philosophy professor at USF), and others whom Filice cannot remember. He does remember that there were fourteen people present.
They decided that the political problem was impractical to address directly, and that what was needed was an educational group to counter the arguments of the pro-choice movement. Filice remembers going around the room and asking each if they wanted to be chairman, but each of them declined. So, by default, Filice became the chairman of this emergent pro-life group in San Francisco. Thus was born United for Life of San Francisco.
United for Life met every two weeks for the next seven years. At their first official meeting, Dr. Raymond Dennehy came up from Santa Clara University, where he taught philosophy. Dr. Augros and he took the task of countering the arguments of their opposition, and they developed a pamphlet in question-and-answer form that became the source of arguments against abortion for all the pro-life groups in the United States. This pamphlet was the basis, later, of a book by Dr. Willkie from Ohio.
United for Life developed the first pro-life newsletter in the United States and contacted all the groups in California and the United States. In most densely-populated areas, ad hoc groups formed. For example, across the bay in Oakland, "Voice of the Unborn" was formed by a number of housewives. In Los Angeles, a right-to-life organization was formed by a group of doctors’ wives. There was a network of such groups who brought information to their legislatures and to young people.
In addition, United for Life developed speakers bureaus: mostly sympathetic lawyers and housewives who went to every school in the Bay Area to present the pro-life message. They purchased films which explored prenatal development. They asked to address every event in the Bay Area where their opposition would be.
United for Life organized the opposition to the bills in the California State Assembly to strike down all the abortion laws, and they "defeated it handsomely."
Mary Ann Schwab and Alice Austurias, members of United for Life, organized the Catholic Office for Life in the Archdiocese of San Francisco and staffed it for many years. Some of the members of United for Life organized the Political Action organization in California as a separate organization because of the tax laws.
The Birthright organization was started in San Francisco by Dr. Filice's second-oldest daughter, Carol Brown. A similar organization with the same name had been started in Toronto, Ontario. Brown and her helpers contacted the Toronto office, and they joined with the international organization. This helped the spread of Birthright offices on the West Coast.
Of Roe v. Wade, Filice has stated: "A purely fabricated case went to the Supreme Court and Justice Blackmun, without shame, wrote a majority opinion that is a masterpiece of false logic. The Court struck down all the laws protecting the child. In doing so they threw our legal system into a shambles. To this day, the effects are felt in the grossly unjust decisions made by the courts to protect the capacity to kill the child in the womb".
Filice finds noteworthy that the pro-life effort was the first effort by Catholic lay people in the United States without the help of the clergy. It was an entirely lay movement. The first, in Filice's experience, in the United States where the people acted without the leadership of their pastors. This was important because the Catholic organizers wanted non-Catholics to join in. Their conviction was that abortion is a human problem and not just a religious one. The early pro-life activists felt that they, as citizens, had to educate the voters in the United States. As a result, many Catholic priests felt that it was not their fight. All that has changed by now, Fr. Filice points out: Priests for Life grew out of United for Life.
Read more about this topic: Francis P. Filice