A Rendezvous With Destiny

In the 21+ years I've edited National Right to Life News, I can not think of a single edition in which we covered as many stories of comparable gravity as those discussed in this issue. We examine threats to our collective humanity which are so dangerous that, if allowed to carry the day, threaten to detach us from our moorings. We are, in a word, at the epicenter of a moral and ethical earthquake.

I will use this space to focus on partial-birth abortion and cloning. But that in no way diminishes the urgency of a host of other vitally important stories.

Take just one, Miguel Estrada, nominated by President Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Senate Democrats, cranking up their old but still finely tuned propaganda machine, are filibustering the nomination of the first Hispanic to this court.

Why? Because Estrada refuses to commit to supporting abortion. This is widely seen as a test run for torpedoing any and all highly qualified judicial candidates should they fail the litmus test established by NARAL and the pro-abortion Democratic Senate leadership.

And what exactly is it that those delightful folks seek to protect? For one thing, partial-birth abortion. Why single that out? Whatever the abortion "technique" employed, doesn't it extinguish the life of a young member of the human family in a bloody, vicious, and vile manner?

Partial-birth abortion is different because, thanks to National Right to Life, the cruelty endemic to all abortions was brought out of the shadows and into the light. Congress has twice passed a ban on this ghastly attack only to be vetoed by President Clinton. But in reviewing a state ban the U.S. Supreme Court said that such unholy violence is constitutionally protected.

We must stand idly by, the Court said, while abortionists jam surgical scissors into the skulls of babies 20-26 weeks old (and older) and suction out their brains. This brutal attack is all the more shocking for it is launched against babies whose bodies the abortionist has largely removed from the mothers' bodies.

The 5-4 decision depended on hairsplitting distinctions remarkable even for highly trained lawyers. But the House of Representatives is coming back this year with a carefully worded refinement that responds to the fig leaf objections the Court hid behind in overturning Nebraska's law.

Alas, as the debate grows more intense in the House, we once again see what ought to be a transparently phony attempt to package "alternative" proposals as good-faith efforts to bridge the gap. And, to be fair, they do build a bridge, one that links dishonesty to dissimulation, making it quicker and easier for proponents to run from one to the other.

The same disregard for even elementary truth telling is on display with human cloning. It's straight out of Alice in Wonderland where Humpty Dumpty tells Alice ("in rather a scornful tone") that "'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more or less."

Cloning is not cloning, if the pro-cloning forces say it's not. "Cloning" is only when the end game is to produce a live birth. By definition, if you create a cloned human embryo but don't implant the new human life in a woman's uterus, it's not "cloning."

There are a host of rhetorical feints, linguistic ploys, and assorted verbal gimmicks which NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson nicely exposes in his stories beginning on page one. But what's crucial to remember is that while it took years and years for abortion advocates to move from "reforming" abortion laws to abolishing them, cloning proponents are flying down the slippery slope like a downhill skier.

You will find this difficult to believe, but there was a bill just a couple of months ago in the New Jersey legislature that was on the verge of passing before opponents were able to publicize just what it would allow. The measure was positioned as a ban on cloning (the worst proposals always are) but would have in fact legalized cloning a human embryo, implanting that same embryo, and then allowing the child to mature to whatever point the researchers and mother agree upon (even to birth) provided the cloned child was not allowed to survive beyond the "newborn" stage.

The law would allow harvesting what the legislation calls "cadaveric" fetal tissue.

"Please pause to consider whose cadaver the tissue is derived from," said four members of the President's Council on Bioethics in a letter to New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey. "It is a cadaver of a distinct member of the species homo sapiens--a human being--who would be brought into being by cloning and, presumably, implanted and permitted to develop to the desired stage of physical maturation for the purpose of being killed for the harvesting of his or her tissues."

The legislation, they wrote, "constitutes the moral madness of killing in the cause of healing--with the possible profit motive that would encourage the grisly practice." This, mind you, came within an eyelash of passing.

NRLC and unborn children need you to be at the top of your game--sharp, insightful, knowledgeable. Our opponents are so well versed at deceit it's become second nature; they really are good at it.

Before you can say, hey-they-stole-my-bill, they can transmogrify a solid ban against all human cloning into a measure that demands that human clones be killed within the first 14 days or, alternatively, turns the child into a living parts inventory store that stays in business until, at the whim of the researcher and mother, there is a fire sale and he or she is destroyed!

Such calculated inhumanity is an engraved invitation to descend into the pit.

The ethos behind abortion could never be confined to simply annihilating unborn babies. It is more like an unexploded shell, waiting for some new batch of victims to step on it. Life as disposable property/commodity--a small step once you wring all compassion out of the human heart.

Respond to the Action Alert on page 28, won't you? We need you and we need your friends to say no to all human cloning!

dave andrusko can be reached at dadandrusk@aol.com