Undoing the First Step

By Dave Andrusko

As often as I may gently clobber “reporters,” it’s also true that there are plenty of good ones out there. One is David Brown, who writes for the Washington Post. Brown, besides being a gifted scribe, is also a medical doctor. Brown did some investigative reporting during the years when the debate over partial-birth abortion was hottest. In 1997 he had interviewed some abortionists and wrote a story that helped clear away some of the many, many myths about partial-birth abortions.

I happen to read a column he wrote a couple of weeks ago, headlined, “War against cancer has more than one target.” His point was that while in one sense we can still talk about cancer as “a single disease” (defined as a “state of uncontrolled growth in cells”), scientists have learned that there are “hundreds of varieties -- each of which can be labeled by its own DNA mutation, chromosomal translocation, gene amplification or other defect .”

So it is, likewise, that the anti-life ethos is, in a sense, a single disease with many varieties, each with their own peculiarities.

Abortion is not euthanasia, is not infanticide, is not a lust to treat unborn embryos as resources to be strip-mined for stem cells. But there are commonalities, and all are rooted in the absence of respect for the uniqueness of every single human being, born and unborn.

I don’t claim that this is an exact parallel, but I thought this still had some interesting implications for us. Brown wrote,

“If cancer is a disease of accumulated errors, the first error is the most important. It sets a new trajectory for the cell and is present in all the descendants. Most cancer researchers believe that if one were able to undo that first step, or block its effects, long-lasting benefit would result even if cure didn't.”

Undo that “first step,” and who knows how much of the anti-life agenda we could roll back.

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