On March 12, a new European pro-life initiative attracted some 1,200 participants to the Salle Gaveau concert hall in Paris for the public launch of the "One of Us Federation." All of the 28 countries of the European Union were represented as well as 31 national organizations, plus several ministers and politicians who want to break with Europe's continual slide towards the culture of death.
"One of Us" started as a European Citizens' Initiative Petition demanding that the European Commission protect all human beings by prohibiting EU funding of scientific research on embryos and embryonic stem cells. One million signatures from a quarter of the countries of the European Union were required for it to gain consideration. It finally gathered a record 1,721,626 endorsements hailing from all of the European nations, far beyond the organizers' expectations.
However the European Commissioners for Research, Innovation and Science, after a hectic public meeting in April 2014, declined to submit a legislative proposal, declaring itself satisfied by the existing framework that allows public European funding of research on existing embryonic stem cell lines.
Given the extraordinary success of the "One of Us" petition, organizers and supporters saw this as a plain case of contempt for almost two million citizens of European nations who felt strongly enough about the issue to join the public appeal.
The "One of Us" federation aims to build on that "momentum" in order to coordinate and multiply pro-life initiatives in all the European countries and at the EU level, in order to obtain protection for all, from the newly-conceived child, to the ill and elderly who are now exposed to legal euthanasia in several European countries.
The federation's president, a former Spanish minister of the interior, Jaime Mayor Oreja, opened the proceedings by saying the launch of "One of Us" is "not just one more act" but a call to individual and collective commitment. "We need to turn our backs on feelings of defeat and resignation, and above all we must stop being overawed by the force of public lies... The answer lies not in extremism, but at the root" of the present situation, he said.
That was in fact the common denominator of the many presentations given on Saturday: many of the speakers recalled the "Christian roots of Europe," underscoring the necessity of returning to them if anything is to be done at all.
From that point of view the choice of Paris as the venue of the launch of "One of Us" was an apt one: France, with its law of strict separation between Church and State, is one of the most violently secular nations of Europe and it was its government that pressured the European Union into obliterating even a fleeting reference to the Christian roots of Europe in its founding Treaty and Charter. That being the case France is surely the place where the fight for human life is facing one of its principal battlegrounds. So it was in a way providential that the Jérôme-Lejeune Foundation, perpetuating the work of the world-renowned genetic scientist and his commitment to protecting human life, took on the organization of Saturday's event.
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