Pro-life teachers angered by march

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Thousands of pro-life teachers and school staff required to belong to the National Education Association across the country are offended by the union's co-sponsorship of a pro-choice march in Washington this Sunday.

The NEA headquarters on 16th Street NW near the White House will act as a hospitality center for the March for Freedom of Choice while the union's nearby state affiliates in New Jersey and elsewhere are organizing buses to bring demonstrators for the event.

The march is being organized by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the American Civil Liberties Union, National Organization for Women, NARAL Pro-Choice America and other liberal and feminist groups.

Abortion "is a political issue and not an educational issue," said NEA member Connie Bancroft, a middle-school teacher for handicapped children in Mahoning County, Ohio, who opposes NEA's sponsorship of the march.

Miss Bancroft is executive director of Teachers Saving Children, a national group of 3,300 pro-life educators that seeks "a commitment to establishing respect for all human life from conception to natural death, especially among professional educators' organizations," she said.

"We're supposed to be for children, and they say it's OK to eliminate our very clientele. That's hard to understand."

The problem, say pro-life members of the 2.7-million-member teachers union, is that they are forced to be dues-paying NEA members because of collective-bargaining agreements in their school districts.

Meanwhile, the NEA takes positions on issues contrary to some members' religious beliefs, which are protected by the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act.

"Every organization -- association, political party and church -- has significant numbers of members who do not agree with every policy item," NEA spokesman Michael Pons said. "That is the greatness of an open, democratic organization such as ours."

Pro-life NEA members said another major objection is that the union's top management tilts toward abortion, as shown by NEA chief lobbyist Randall J. Moody's dual role serving on the Planned Parenthood Action Fund Federal Political Action Committee, for which he was an original board member and treasurer for three years.