More than 800 attend Kansans for Life banquet

by Marc and Julie Anderson
mjanderson@theleaven.org

OVERLAND PARK — Within the United States, only about 10% of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are born, a fact the mother-daughter duo of Rachel Campos-Duffy and Evita Duffy-Alfonso highlighted near the beginning of their keynote address at the Kansans for Life banquet held on March 9 at the Overland Park Convention Center.

Campos-Duffy serves as a cohost of “Fox & Friends Weekend Edition,” while Duffy-Alfonso, 25, is the host of the “Bongino Report Early Edition” daily podcast.

The two opened their presentation with a short video of the youngest member of the Campos-Duffy family, 5-year-old Valentina, born with Down syndrome. She is the youngest child of nine born to Campos-Duffy and Sean Duffy, current secretary for the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Campos-Duffy and Duffy-Alfonso said it’s sad to realize so many of Valentina’s potential friends have been aborted, given the statistics in the United States. In other countries such as Denmark, though, as many as 98% of babies are aborted as a “result of progress,” said Campos-Duffy.

“In ancient pagan civilizations,” she continued, “child sacrifice and disposing of weak, deformed or unwanted children was pretty commonplace. . . . The Romans routinely abandoned unwanted children on the roadside. . . . Killing a sickly or deformed baby was considered not only beneficial for the Roman Empire but it was acceptable.”

Christians, however, Campos-Duffy said, believed differently.

“To the Christian, that helpless baby that was abandoned on the roadside had the same value as any of the aristocrats or even the emperor himself,” she said. In fact, Christianity has “a long tradition” of saving babies. When Constantine converted to Christianity in 312, Christians asked for “this barbaric practice” to be banned.

“Abortion has divided America for the same grave moral reason that slavery divided America,” said Duffy-Alfonso. “In both cases, the powerful want to decide who is sufficiently human to have rights. . . . In both slavery and abortion, children are separated from parents for profit.”

Campos-Duffy agreed, telling the attendees, “You are here today because you know that America will never be united until the evil of abortion is resolved and until the unborn are legally included into the human family. . . . You are the abolitionists of our time. You have dedicated yourselves to providing women with love and a safe passage from the darkness of abortion to the light that comes from giving life.”

Near the end of the Civil War, concluded Duffy-Alfonso, Abraham Lincoln visited Richmond, Virginia. As he walked through the city, he came upon some freed slaves who sang songs of gratitude to him.

Lincoln said to them, “My friends, you are free. Free as air. . . . Your liberty is your birthright. God gave it to you as he gave it to others and it is a sin that you have been deprived of it for so many years.”

“Isn’t that how we all feel about the innocent human lives in the womb?” Campos-Duffy asked. “That liberty is their right, too, and that it is a sin that so many beautiful souls have been deprived of that right to life for so many years?”