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In 2009 pro-life and pro-family organisations face daunting new challenges. We hope the election of Barack Obama as US President will expiate the residual guilt many Americans feel about slavery.

If African-American men follow his example of hard work and study, getting married before having children, and being a responsible father, many will extricate themselves from the endemic poverty and dysfunction much of that community is mired in.

On the negative side, the pro-life movement fears his ardent support for abortion evidenced in his vote against the ban on partial-birth abortion and the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, his undertaking to fund abortion overseas and to sign the Freedom of Choice Act which restrict pro-life endeavours and conscientious objections to being involved in abortion procedures. His election will make Endeavour Forum's pro-life efforts at UN meetings much more difficult. In Victoria Archbishop Denis Hart has issued strong pastorals against the Abortion Law Reform Bill 2008.

However, some church bureaucrats have not understood that the battle against the Bill and efforts to amend its worst features was not a battle against the common man/woman in the street who indicated in polls that they wanted abortion to remain legally available but deplored the high number of abortions.

The battle was not even against most of the pro-abortion male MPs who voted for the Bill. The real battle was against a strident group of Emily's List feminists who regard abortion as a positive good, a sacrament. In fact many of them have said precisely this - that if men could become pregnant, they would have instituted abortion as a sacrament.

That is why these feminists cannot tolerate ANY negative connotations about abortion - not fetal pain, psychological distress for the mother, not even the coercion many women experience to abort their babies. Emily's List feminists believe that even if a woman is coerced into having an abortion, it is for her own good, it is a life-enhancing and liberating experience which will increase her "opportunities" in the future.

This is also why these feminists will never endorse any pregnancy support initiatives, any "cooling-off" time, and specially not giving women scientific information such as seeing her baby on ultrasound or listening to the baby's heartbeat. Jo Wainer, ardent abortion advocate, has stated bluntly in response to the "common ground" view that there are too many abortions, "there are not too many abortions, there are as many abortions as women want." Former Democrat Senator, Lyn Allison, and Collen Hartland, Victorian Greens MLC, both childless, tell unrepentantly about aborting their only pregnancy.

It is this "abortion is a common good" perspective which relentlessly promotes abortion and why every amendment designed to modify the worst aspects of the Abortion Law Reform Bill failed. In our efforts to turn back the tide, we first need to understand who our opponents are - and it is not the common man/woman with whom we might be able to find some common ground.