Today, I ended a 28-year term on the Board, and a decade-plus as Chairman, of an nonprofit corporation that will now wind down and go out of existence. It was surprisingly wrenching.
In 1984, the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) got a “national support center” for issues of discriminatory medical treatment decisions — especially discrimination based on disability. That concern extended to the particularly excruciating disability of traumatic brain injury that left people arguably in a “persistent vegetative state” — a term that itself is patently dehumanizing by equating people and vegetables. Any LSC office presented with such a case could call on a resource with deep expertise.
Our name was a real mouth full. We sometimes cracked each other up coming up with shorter versions, especially the ones that had the whiff of political correctness to them. The long name stuck.
Over the next dozen years, that national support center saved many lives. It filed many amicus briefs and began running an annual conference for anyone interested (free and expense-paid attendance at which conferences was the only perk Directors got for their services) and publishing a scholarly journal.
But in 1996, the GOP “class of ’94” got their retribution on the LSC, which had been a whipping boy for many Republicans. Although our support center had come into existence in the Reagan years, presumably consistent with the “conservative” values of 1984, our funding was cut by the “conservatives” of that later era.
Litigation and advocacy thus became impossible financially. We were freed from some limitations that had come with LSC funding (understandably, the LSC defined our mission and we were not to go beyond it — so although the Board was uniformly anti-abortion as well as anti-euthanasia, anti-assisted-suicide, and pro-treatment, we did not touch the abortion issue), but that freedom without money was pretty hollow.
Only the scholarly journal was self-supporting, so continuation of that journal became the mission of the corporation.
[Begin Sarcasm]Since we Directors were all a bunch of mercenaries, intent on living high on the hog on the government’s dime, we of course stayed on despite losing even the modest perk of free conference attendance. [End Sarcasm] But the Board couldn’t really afford to gather any more. Our meetings decreased to annual, and now were by phone. Then one of the stalwart staff attorneys, with decades of experience, succumbed to cancer.
In 2012, the flow of manuscripts worthy of publication finally dried up, as did many of the subscriptions as the university libraries who were our main subscribers cut budgets and focused more on digital. The journal no longer was sustainable. It will publish no more, refund unfulfilled subscriptions, and the corporation will continue only to husband the continuing royalties on copyrighted materials, retire the modest debts and payables, and then dissolve.
Two of us on the phone meeting today were there all 28 years. The rest had been on the Board for more than 20 years. We all knew the time had come. There was no dissention.
We amended the bylaws to allow a Board of just three members and elected the next Board: the Editor of the journal and the two associates in his nonprofit-serving-nonprofits law firm. That is, we voted ourselves out of the picture.
Then we reminisced, especially about our friend who cancer took from us, and wept. I longed for someone to give a benediction, but there was nobody. We wished each other Godspeed and hung up. I suspect I’m not the only one who continued weeping for a while.
Our work is unfinished in the sense that the culture of death continues its grim advance. But we were faithful, and when it was clear that it could not continue, we honorably pulled the plug when our creditors might still be paid rather than plugging away and hoping for a miracle — the failure of which to arrive would be skin off the nose only of creditors.
This is the second generally “pro-life” Board I’ve left in the last 6 weeks after more than 25 years’ service each. This one died. The other, a Pregnancy Resource Center, thrives as never before. Neither was political or polemical, as I burned out on personal involvement in pro-life politics (beyond voting) long ago. I watched another entity die a few decades ago, shortly after I became its lawyer, from changes in Medicaid reimbursements that left it incapable of operating in the black.
Times change. Politics sometimes is the change agent. Truth and justice don’t change all that much, if at all.
Our journal told the truth, and advocated for justice, at least in print, after the dollars to fight for justice in court succumbed to the cancer of politics.
Our adversaries stir up passions with slogans along the lines of “are you going to let them tell you what to do?” It’s so effective that one of the Directors today quoted an allied leader, in a state where one of the “life issues” is being fought in the legislature: “Our people showed up for the committee hearing, and they brought their professional credentials, not their Rosaries, thank God! The Bishop came late and didn’t get a chance to testify, thank God!” When you lack logic or human compassion (“suffering with” instead of killing the sufferer), you tend to resort to very American techniques like anti-Catholic bigotry.
Maranatha!
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 