LifeNews Updates

Who we are

Sarasota-Manatee Right to Life, Inc., an affiliate of the National Right to Life Committee, is a non-profit, secular community organization established to educate the public through peaceful means regarding life issues such as abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, stem cell research and assisted suicide.   SMRTL promotes the protection of the right to life of the unborn child, the elderly and the disabled by promoting legal, political, social and cultural reforms designed to ensure both the right to life and the human dignity of each person from the moment of fertilization until natural death. Read more here.

Help save babies,

support moms

and dads

Join us to pray for unborn babies and their moms and dads, in front of Sarasota Planned Parenthood any Friday, any time you wish between 10am and noon. It’s on Central Avenue between 7th and 8th streets (five blocks north of Fruitville, west of Orange). (Don’t park in business or private lots or drives. Use only city-designated street parking.) Babies are being saved from abortion by prayer and sidewalk counseling there. And support is offered to the moms. If you can’t be there, pray for the babies wherever you are.

Join our cause

Annual dues are $15 individual or $20 family.  Send to Sarasota-Manatee Right to Life P.O. Box 2835 Sarasota 34230. With your request to join, please include your name, address, phone and e-mail address. You also get a monthly newsletter. “Life Matters,” and a local pro-life e-mail letter, “Pro-Vita.” If you would like to get further involved, just call or write us, or visit one of our monthly board meetings.

We’re fighting

for our freedoms

We join the hundreds of thousands of many faiths (and even no faith) who rallied in 140 cities for freedom of religion and freedom of conscience across the nation. And we will continue to fight as long as our basic freedoms are threatened.

Right to Life is the oldest and largest pro-life group in the nation. We are secular; religion doesn’t play a role in our positions. But we do accept without question, for moral and biological reasons, that human life begins at conception. If you doubt that, check any grade-school science book. And that life has rights under our Declaration of Independence, which preceded our First Amendment — the right to life and liberty, inalienable, which even government cannot take away.

The Right to Life organization is affected by the Health and Human Services mandate that would require every employer, unless narrowly exempted, to provide and pay for contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs. We aren’t like churches; we can’t even get a religious exemption. But unless we get an exemption based on conscience or employer size, we’d probably go bankrupt with the fines if we don’t comply. Or we’d be required to pay for procedures that contradict what our entire organization stands for — procedures that would end innocent human life.

Yes, END life. Some forms of contraception can end life before implantation, and others have the same ingredients as the abortion pill. The makers admit this in their literature for users.

Contraception is NOT “health care.” And abortion is not health care. Health care involves medicine or procedures that improve health or cure illness. Pregnancy is a natural condition, not an illness. Paying for contraception is paying for a voluntary lifestyle, not a health condition. Paying for abortion is paying for a voluntary decision — elective surgery, most often without any medical necessity.

The concern here is not just contraception. In an act of deception, and in violation of its own executive order, the administration has just laid out — in 644 pages — regulations showing how it also will force taxpayers to cover abortion — for any reason, even late-term abortion — in health plan exchanges — supported by federal tax funds. People would pay an abortion surcharge — mandated, no maximum amount set — but they will not be told that in advance when they’re trying to select a policy.

This is a sharp break from decades of federal law banning federal funds for abortion and for insurance that includes abortion.

But the government claims we’d save money because birth control is cheaper than pregnancy. So, by that logic, killing babies is cheaper than raising them. And assisted suicide is cheaper than health care for the elderly. And letting cancer patients die is cheaper than treating them.

The bottom line is: We are a democracy. In a democracy, we have the right to not violate our conscience — whether religiously-motivated or simply morally and ethically.

We have the right to liberty. We fought a war for this liberty, it’s in our FIRST Amendment, and guaranteed further by several federal laws.

Let’s get one thing straight: The so-called “birth control” mandate isn’t about providing contraception; that’s already available. And it’s not about the cost; it’s quite affordable at a local pharmacy. (Yet for those providing contraception, sales generated $15.5 billion in 2010.)

The mandate, in essence, is about the fundamental right to liberty — a right the slaves were given 149 years ago.

39 years ago, we lost the even-more fundamental Right to Life. We’re still working to get that back.

But even fifth-graders get the bit about the right to liberty … so should our government.

This isn’t about birth control. It’s about government control.

-- Jim Styer, president, Sarasota-Manatee Right to Life

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