HARVEST TIME

"Rather the question is: Who gets the credit? The one who produces the initial seed? The one who carries it to fertile ground? The one who raises it from seedling to mature plant? Or the person who happens along and notices what everyone else has ignored?... Aristarchus proved that the Earth was round 2,000 years before Columbus. But the world wasn't ready, and the idea didn't stick."

K.C. Cole, Los Angeles Times, January 29

"Morally speaking, the first issue is never what we are to do, but what we should see....You can only act in the world that you can see, and you must be taught to see by learning to say. Therefore, using the language of abortion [that is, not allowing the act of killing unborn babies to be drowned in euphemisms] is one way of training ourselves as Christians to see and to practice its opposite - - hospitality, and particularly hospitality to children and the vulnerable. Therefore, abortion is a word that reminds us how Christians are to speak about, to envision, and to live life...."

Stanley Hauerwas, "The Church & Abortion"

Although the press of time and events can often make it very difficult to achieve, ideally every story in each issue of NRL News contains at least three ingredients. Each article should illuminate what motivates and sustains the stalwart soldiers who selflessly fight the good fight, illustrate how unchangeable truths apply to our battle, and interpret in a reader-friendly fashion what otherwise might seem to be simply the latest round of thrusts and parries. It strikes me that this edition fills the bill nicely, which makes the stories hold together in a particularly helpful way.

My hunch is that once the careful reader pages through this issue, two dominant themes will lift their spirits: the enormity of what grassroots pro-lifers and NRLC together are accomplishing and the rapid emergence of trends that redound to the children's benefits, many of which are the end results of years of unheralded pro-life labor. As a backdrop please consider two related ideas.

C.S. Lewis, the preeminent Christian apologist of the last half- century, once said that others may have been "sent on advanced theological sorties to conquer new territories, but [God] sent me to defend the fundamentals." He won countless millions to the faith by steadfastly sticking to the basics - - what he called " Mere Christianity."

In the abortion context, no one has a better set of "fundamentals" to offer than pro-lifers. Our case rests on first principles - - mutuality, justice, mercy, and compassion. But how do we get a chance to educate people who in their heart of hearts quite likely dread the prospect of soberly examining their own consciences?

Long ago when I was preparing to become a teacher, someone told me that while it's difficult to adequately teach any subject, if the curriculum is comprised of "true truths," frontal assaults - - lecturing (or hectoring) - - are unlikely to work. A far better way to get past the battery of defense mechanisms that people erect, he said, is to assist them to find the truth for themselves.

If you think about it, that really is what we have undertaken, isn't it? Presenting the truth reasonably and in a manner that people can effectively process. This issue offers numerous examples of how the threat posed by the truth is sending pro-abortionists into a frenzy of self-doubt and overreaction.

Michele Jackson politely ridicules the bizarre contention that it is some sort of unconstitutional hindrance merely to require that before a woman contemplating abortion actually ends her child's life, she is given scientifically accurate information that explains her child's development to that point (see story, page 23). Don't such proposals just make the notion of an informed "choice" real?

Paul Greenberg, more directly, furiously mocks pro-abortionists in Arkansas who went ballistic when a bill passed the state House of Representatives requiring that a woman get a sonogram of her unborn baby and wait 24 hours before aborting. (The bill later died in the state Senate.)

As Greenberg so astutely observed, "If a women stops to think about it, the nature of what is being done, and what all of us are acquiescing in, might dawn upon her." A "light might click on" and "what has become a standard form of birth control in this country - - abortion - - could be endangered" (see page nine).

In addition, while it is, of course, partly blather to gin up their troops, when our opposition bemoans how they have been unable to recruit young people - - how they are "graying" even as young people are pouring their idealism into the pro-life movement - - they are only admitting a demographic reality (see pages 16 and 27).

As I listened to NARAL's Kate Michelman lament her plight, it instantly brought to mind an article written by Tom Beaudoin that appeared in the November 21, 1998, issue America magazine. His subject was the spiritual lives of "Generation X." Part of Beaudoin's intriguing thesis was that for baby boomers, the essential question was, "What is the meaning of Life?" But what haunts Generation Xers is, "Will you be there for me?"

In light of the over 38 million unborn babies who have been lost to the abortion juggernaut unleashed by Justice Harry Blackmun, maybe what they are really saying is, "Why was I spared?" Either way, I am convinced that eventually much of Generation X will move into the pro-life camp.

So unnerved are pro-abortionists that no wonder NOW would go gaga over a banner that merely read, "Life: What a Beautiful Choice." The extent to which NOW manufactured a spurious " controversy" would have been amusing, had it not been such a distraction (see page 13).

In a similar attempt to use the courts to blunt a free exchange over "fundamentals," a former Assistant Secretary of the U.S.Department of Health and Human Services was crucial in influencing a local transit authority to take down a paid ad it had accepted which asserted that induced abortion increases the likelihood of breast cancer - - and a deadlier breast cancer to boot.

But, again, like a flower pushing its way through the cracks in an urban sidewalk, truth is winning out. An appeals court overturned a federal judge's decision that the transit authority had acted "reasonably" and ordered the transit authority to permit the ad to be reposted and to pay $165,000 in damages (see page 17).

This issue of "the right to life newspaper of record" is replete with positive news, from the second-degree murder conviction of Jack Kevorkian, to the startlingly positive changes in nurses' attitudes toward abortion, to the clarification of Steve Forbes's pro-life position on abortion and assisted suicide, to the reintroduction of the Child Custody Protection Act.

But if you have time for only one article, please turn to page 6 and read Jacki Ragan's very thoughtful look at all that grassroots pro-life America and NRLC are accomplishing together. Understand, focusing on the daily changes in ebb and flow of events can obscure the bigger picture - - the underlying, encouraging developments. Stories such as Jacki's portrait of how you and NRLC have assembled a powerful pro-life machine help us understand how a campaign of patient, loving truth telling is winning the day.This editorial began with a quote from Prof. Stanley Hauerwas: " Morally speaking, the first issue is never what we are to do, but what we should see." Because of you, the American public is beginning to understand how wretched is the truth about abortion, how much lethal damage it inflicts on mothers and their unborn babies.

For 26 years you've planted the seeds. For much of that time the world was not ready for your message of love for mother and child because the ground was not fertile. That is now changing, praise God!

Can harvest time be far off?

dha