The Pre-Roe Pro-Life Movement in Minnesota and New York

multi-issue approach was a tactic and a skill that largely came out of its founders’
decades of successful work and experience within MCCL. Minnesota and MCCL were
vital schoolhouses for its leaders that would soon drive the national movement’s success.
However, while ACCL employed an effective strategy, its finances were in poor shape
(in large part due to the alternative strength of the NRLC), and leaders recognized that the
motivations of many ACCL members had greatly diminished by the early 1980s. As the
hopes for the HLA faded, so also did the ranks and enthusiasm of pro-life activists, no
matter their affiliated group. 55
While ACCL and NRLC travelled in different directions, many pro-life activists
felt lost by 1981. The movement had privately split on a grassroots and national level;
publicly, not even Reagan addressed the destiny of the issue in a coherent way. As
previously mentioned, while he remained pro-life in opinion, he rarely did more for the
cause than occasionally appoint pro-life activists to government positions. Additionally,
old wounds between Mecklenburg and the NRLC were clearly persistent into the early
1980s, as the National Right to Life Convention invited her as its keynote speaker in June
of 1982, but she declined. Morton Blackwell, a conservative activist who served as a
Special Assistant to President Reagan, spoke instead and introduced a pre-taped video of
Ronald Reagan, which according to one 1982 Cherry Hill convention attendee, offered
“warm and congenial, if vague, blessings.” 56
All this caused the convention itself to be
very underwhelming, according to attendees. 57 Therefore, historian Connie Paige writes
55 For a very detailed report on the status and strategy of ACCL in the early 1980s, consult
William C. Hunt’s Strategic Plan for American Citizens Concerned for Life, Inc. and American Citizens
Concerned for Life, Inc. Education Fund, 19 July 1984, ACCL Records, Box 21, Folder: ACCL Admin
File: Board of Directors Rev. William C. Hunt, S.T.D: (1), Gerald R. Ford Library.
56 Personal attendants at National Right to Life annual conventions, Omaha, 1981, and Cherry
Hill, N.J., 1982, quoted in Paige, 232.
57 Ibid.
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