By Thea Jarvis

Pro-life will ultimately sift out as the option of choice for informed men and women, said Helen Alvaré, U.S. bishops’ representative on pro-life activities, during a one-day speaking tour of Atlanta Feb. 3.

“Will we prevail? Of course,” Ms. Alvaré said during a break from morning talks to students at St. Pius X High School. “We will in the long run.”

St. Pius was the first stop on Ms. Alvaré’s Atlanta schedule, which included later visits to Marist School and Oglethorpe University.

The Catholic Church is concerned about the unborn and about women who think abortion is their only option, she said, because Church teachings “lead us to work for all the vulnerable.”

“We speak out for affirmative solutions to what is driving women to the (abortion) clinics,” said Ms. Alvaré. “Justice for both” the mother and child is the goal for Catholic pro-life activity. Just as Jesus Christ treated the marginalized in his society with special care, so “we have not only the right but the responsibility to bring the pro-life message to the public square.”

Ms. Alvaré was principal legal liaison for the U.S. bishops before assuming her current position as director of planning and information for the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) in 1990.

The day before taking the job, Ms. Alvaré said, she sat at Mass crying, facing major doubts about the high-profile nature of the work. She would be the first to fill the newly created slot.

“I definitely had this feeling that I was being led – and I didn’t want (the job),” she remembered. Despite misgivings, she gave her consent the following day and hasn’t regretted the decision.

After two-and-a-half years as the NCCB’s national pro-life spokesperson, Ms. Alvaré has become a common face at congressional hearings and television talk shows. She is interviewed by the press and radio and makes public speaking appearances all over the U.S.

At 32, she is the epitome of a savvy nineties’ professional. Educated at Villanova University and Cornell Law School, she is articulate and assertive, with a firm grasp of complex facts and sensitive issues. In a well-cut black suit and colorful trailing scarf, she is an attractive, well-modulated voice for life.

Talking to St. Pius juniors and seniors, Ms. Alvaré’s warmth and humor surface spontaneously. Smiling easily, dark eyes flashing with enthusiasm, she admits, “My (high school) uniform was almost identical to yours!”

Raised in a large, middle-class Hispanic family in Philadelphia, Ms. Alvaré’s respect for life is well-grounded. Her sister is disabled, she said, and her family has always been “extraordinarily supportive” in helping her cope with the disability.

People sometimes questioned whether, because of her sister’s dependence on others, it would have been better had she not lived.

“Those arguments made me angry,” said Ms. Alvaré, because her sister is an especially valuable member of the family.

The same questions are raised about the unborn, she said. “The child is dependent on the mother, but do we penalize people because they are dependent?”

Intuitively, Ms. Alvaré observed, “women have held onto their intimate inner feelings” about life in the womb: life is there and should be preserved.

“A woman is not bearing a dog, a flower or a tree,” she said. “She’s bearing a human being.”

As a feminist, Ms. Alvaré sees abortion as “a violent surgery” that traumatizes the body and spirit of the mother and destroys the child.

Abortion is the “absolute opposite of feminism” because it works against the powerless. Promoting abortion as a solution to a crisis pregnancy does not offer a woman her rightful option, she said, but, in a sexist putdown that devalues her status, hands her a primitive substitute for real social policies.

“A real pro-woman argument would say the fact that (a woman) bears children is a gift, not a liability,” said Ms. Alvaré. In the case of life issues, “education is fundamental” in exposing the faulty reasoning of abortion advocates.

“To talk about abortion is upsetting,” she said, especially when people are confronted with the fact of 4,400 abortions a day, 1.6 million each year.

“Most Americans are clueless” when it comes to actual abortion statistics, she believes. Enough abortions have been performed in the U.S. over the past 20 years – 29 to 30 million reported, even more when unreported abortions are included – to “wipe out most of the Midwest.”

Ironically, women targeted as needing the option of legal abortion – the poor, minorities, the uneducated—are more inclined to oppose it, said Ms. Alvaré. Single non-Hispanic white middle-class women are the largest population choosing abortion. The highest group supporting abortion are single white men between 35 and 44 years old.

According to statistics provided by Planned Parenthood, whom Ms. Alvaré cites as “the largest abortion provider in the U.S.,” with the largest chain of abortion clinics, only three percent of abortions are performed because the mother’s health is jeopardized. Only one percent are performed because of rape or incest.

The current administration is out of step with some 60 percent of Americans who claim to be pro-choice, but in fact support abortion only in the case of rape or incest, Ms. Alvaré said.

“Most Americans in their hearts, in their actual positions” are against abortion, she said. Yet “we essentially have abortion on demand” in this country since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in the Roe vs. Wade case permitting abortion through the third trimester of pregnancy. As abortion became legal, the number of abortions in this country has increased “at least six times.”

“If it were not profitable, there would not be doctors doing it,” she said. According to her figures, Planned Parenthood earns some $200 million per year from clinics, grants and contributions.

The Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) under consideration in Washington is “fundamentally flawed,” said Ms. Alvaré. It specifically forbids informed consent and allows unrestricted abortion up to fetal viability. Even after fetus is considered viable, abortion is basically available if the woman wants it, she said.

“Unfortunately, (President Clinton) is the strongest pro-abortion president we’ve ever had,” she said, lifting the ban on federal funding for abortions and promoting fetal tissue research.

On the other hand, pro-life advocates “are much more diverse” as a group than are abortion proponents, who tend to be rigid and inflexible, she said. Feminists for Life, Women Affirming Life, Democrats for Life, Gays and Lesbians for Life, even Atheists for Life come under the wide pro-life umbrella.

Four St. Pius X High School seniors who heard Helen Alvaré presentation Feb. 3 thought she did a good job.

“She was really well-informed,” said Amy Sullivan, who, with her fourth year Lifestyle Choices class, joined Ms. Alvaré in the campus chapel.

Classmate Bo Ollinger was impressed that the speaker “had the statistics to back … up” her opinions and that she didn’t base her pro-life views solely on religious grounds.

“Even a simple course in biology” teaches that the baby is separate from the mother and has a life of its own, said Virginia Thompson. She thought Ms. Alvaré’s use of facts was “convincing.”

“She knows what she’s talking about,” Ms. Thompson said.

Kim Morris felt Ms. Alvaré presented the sensitive issue of abortion in a way that made it “not just a Catholic thing.” She was particularly grateful that Ms. Alvaré spoke to students “without being condescending.”

The seniors agreed that they would like to explore the issue of adoption and how it relates to the pro-life agenda.

“Tons of people are just waiting to adopt children,” Ms. Sullivan said, adding that this dimension of the abortion debate gives more weight to pro-life sentiment.