Pro-life activists rally at the State House

Photo by Tessa Roy, WPRO News

By WPRO News

Pro-life activists filled the State House rotunda on Tuesday to speak against abortion rights bills being considered by legislators this year, but also to dispute a common statistic shared by the pro-choice crowd that 71% of Rhode Islanders believe in the right to an abortion – they argue that poll’s question was too vague and the number is misused.

“A lot of politicians in this State House believed that number without checking into it. So they just said oh wow, I guess the overwhelming majority of people really support the Reproductive Health Care Act because Planned Parenthood is telling me,” said Tyler Rowley, President of Servants of Christ for Life.

Carey Jeffrey, President of the recently formed Citizens for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, said her group enlisted a high profile pollster to run numbers of their own and found widespread opposition to late term abortions.

“I don’t think there’s that much of a disconnect. I think people just on a gut level recognize that this shouldn’t happen,” she said. “When a baby dies in an abortion, we could be killing the future President of the United States, we could be killing somebody that would discover the cure for cancer, we could be killing somebody’s beloved spouse. Everybody has a role and a purpose.”

Rowley said he is concerned that pro-life,conservative voices like his are “not heard very much in a liberal state.” Representative Camille Vella-Wilkinson was at the rally to collect petitions signed by opponents of “a bill that would allow fully-developed unborn babies to be aborted in the Ocean State.”

“The main focus right now is to stop the codification of Roe v. Wade, especially in the area of the late term abortions,” she said.

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