{"id":260516,"date":"2022-01-11T14:42:17","date_gmt":"2022-01-11T20:42:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=260516"},"modified":"2022-01-11T15:45:19","modified_gmt":"2022-01-11T21:45:19","slug":"remembering-american-life-league-jim-sedlak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/remembering-american-life-league-jim-sedlak\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering American Life League’s Jim Sedlak, a defender of truth and of life"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The pro-life movement grieves the loss of Jim Sedlak<\/a>, the executive director of American Life League (ALL) and a recognized expert on Planned Parenthood, who passed away Monday, January 10, 2022 at the age of 78. He was a husband, father, grandfather, faithful Catholic, and a dear friend to many in the pro-life movement. He traveled both nationally and internationally, exposing Planned Parenthood and training many about how to keep the abortion giant out of their local schools.<\/p>\n

“Dear friends and supporters of ALL. It is with sadness that we report the death of James W. Sedlak, executive director of ALL and founder of STOPP, International,” Judie Brown, president of ALL,\u00a0tweeted<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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American Life League tweets sad news of the passing of Jim Sedlak (Image: Twitter)<\/p><\/div>\n

Sedlak was a physicist by trade, and worked for IBM for thirty years.<\/p>\n

“Jim taught physics at Marymount High School in New York City. He worked 30 years for the IBM Corporation as a research physicist and as manager of its corporate new products release and control methodologies,” Sedlak’s onine bio<\/a>\u00a0states.\u00a0“While working for IBM, he published four invention disclosures, received seven company awards, ran numerous corporate-wide task forces, achieved the position of senior engineer, and was recognized as the corporate expert on the release and control of engineering changes. He retired from IBM in 1993 to devote a full-time effort to the pro-life cause.”<\/p>\n

Jim Sedlak’s pro-life conversion<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Jim Sedlak<\/p><\/div>\n

In 2020, Sedlak was a guest<\/a> on a pro-life show where he detailed his transformation to the pro-life cause.<\/p>\n

“In 1979, I read a book called the Tiniest Humans<\/em>,” Sedlak said.\u00a0The book was authored by Dr.\u00a0Jerome Le Jeune\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>Albert William Liley.\u00a0<\/span>“And the book was about their patients, the babies in the womb.\u00a0And it was just an absolutely compelling book about the humanity of the preborn child. And that’s what brought me into the pro-life movement,” he stated.<\/p>\n

That same year, Sedlak attended an event where the guest speaker was Judie Brown, who co-founded ALL in 1979.\u00a0The two would join efforts years later.<\/p>\n

Jim Sedlak’s mission to “STOPP” Planned Parenthood<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to Sedlak’s testimony, in 1985, Planned Parenthood announced the opening of a “facility that could do surgical procedures” in his community.<\/p>\n

“Of course, we knew it meant abortion,” he stated.\u00a0“And that’s how we formed an organization called STOPP, which stands for Stop Planned Parenthood.”<\/p>\n

Sedlak was passionate about stopping Planned Parenthood’s influence in school sex education programs, as well as ending their ability to root themselves into local communities. His goal was to initially stop Planned Parenthood in his own community, but as pro-lifers learned of his success, that mission quickly blossomed into a national \u2014 and eventually international \u2014 mission.\u00a0Though he formed STOPP “just to fight the local Planned Parenthood,” he said, “God had other plans.”<\/p>\n

“As we fought the local Planned Parenthood, people heard about us, people wanted us to come and get involved in fights against Planned Parenthood in first the surrounding counties and then in surrounding states and then eventually…in countries around the world,” he said.<\/p>\n

As a result, according to his bio<\/a>, in 1986, Sedlak co-founded and later became president of STOPP<\/a> (Stop Planned Parenthood International). The organization eventually joined American Life League.<\/p>\n

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Jim Sedlak 2020<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1992, Sedlak published the book “Parent Power,” which received glowing reviews from pro-life giants like George Grant and the late Joseph Scheidler<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Planned Parenthood has been able to have laws passed in a number of states requiring sex education in the classroom. In those states, parents will want to use this book to fight the offensive sex education programs and substitute ‘pro-abstinence’ education until such times as the laws can be changed. In states where no such laws exist, parents are encouraged to get all sex education removed from their schools and to guard against the passage of mandatory sex ed laws,” Sedlak wrote in the book’s introduction.<\/p>\n

A year later, in 1993, Sedlak was identified by Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) as “one of the 15 ‘most active’ fighters against Planned Parenthood sex education programs. In 1995, PPFA featured Sedlak in two segments of its anti-life film\u00a0Unholy Alliance,”\u00a0<\/em>ALL wrote in Sedlak’s bio.<\/p>\n

In 1999, as the United States was in the midst of the approval process of the abortion pill<\/a>\u00a0(mifepristone), Sedlak warned the New York Times<\/a> that there could be serious side effects, and he was not wrong. Shortly after the abortion pill was approved<\/a>, women began to die.\u00a0”And I would suspect that it would be the right of the American people to know who the manufacturers are so they can demand legal redress if something goes wrong,” Sedlak told the paper.<\/p>\n

In 2017, Sedlak told<\/a> a group of pro-lifers that Planned Parenthood is “an organization that is unraveling.”<\/p>\n