A Badge of Honor
In years to come, I strongly suspect historians will look back on these past few months and conclude that the rancorous debate over abortion, unbeknownst, turned a corner. An overly optimistic, even silly assessment, you ask, an example of the wish being father to the deed?
I grant you few pro-lifers are routinely more optimistic than I am. Having conceded that, I would argue that there are signs aplenty that the once frozen abortion debate has developed serious cracks.
Let me move back a step. It is almost impossible to exaggerate how passionately pro-abortionists believe in the slippery slope. They are utterly convinced that if they give those crazy pro-lifers an inch, the whole house of cards (to switch metaphors) will collapse.
Pro-lifers, including me on occasion, are wont to dismiss this as little more than tiresome, fundraising rant. However, I have come to see that they are on to something profoundly important.
As it happens I received a call this morning from an old friend. Prof. William Brennan is the author of three outstanding, must-read books: The Abortion Holocaust: Today's Final Solution; Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives; and Medical Holocausts: Exterminative Medicine in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America.
The common theme, the common denominator, of his life-long work is the power of language to dehumanize vulnerable categories of human beings. Stripped of their humanity, they were left to the tender mercies of those who consider them less than cattle.
He called to graciously congratulate NRL News and Today's News & Views for outstanding coverage of partial-birth abortion. (The real credit goes to NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson, whose encyclopedic knowledge and 24/7 workload are the primary reasons the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act passed over deeply entrenched opposition in Congress, especially among pro-abortion Democrats.)
Our conversation drifted into a discussion of the media coverage of the three trials in which the National Abortion Federation, Planned Parenthood, and an assortment of abortionists are challenging the ban signed into law last November. While most accounts contain only a snippet or two from the testimony of abortionists, they are enough for even the casual reader to learn fundamental truths.
This "technique" takes the life of babies past the mid-point in pregnancy in a manner that bears an uncanny resemblance to cattle being moved through a slaughterhouse. If that weren't macabre enough, persistent probing by Justice Department lawyers defending the ban, and clarifying questions by at least one presiding judge, are making the strong case that during their death throes these babies may suffer unimaginable pain.
Dr. Brennan pointed out that a key reason the Nazis were able to exterminate millions and millions of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and the handicapped was because the German press - - once one of the most fiercely independent in Europe - - was reduced to a propaganda tool for the Nazis. In our time, until recently, most media outlets voluntarily operated as little more than stenographers, dutifully passing along pro-abortion talking points.
They are still a long ways from embracing objectivity. But the ferocious debate over partial-birth abortion and the subsequent eye-opening (and blood curdling) revelations that are coming out in testimony in the partial-birth abortion trials are forcing a partial reevaluation. (See page 24.) Maybe there really is something to the idea of "the wisdom of repugnance." Perhaps that explains why the idea of jabbing surgical scissors into the backs of kids' heads and vacuuming out their brains gives morally sentient human beings pause.
Space permits only a few words about the further contour-alerting impact of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (UVVA). Slate columnist William Saletan is no friend of our Movement. In fact, he seems to see himself as the canary in the mineshaft for the abortion movement. Listen to me, he chirps, I'm warning you that danger is approaching.
In a column that appeared March 29, Saletan advised "pro-choice" politicians to wise up "if they want to save Roe v. Wade." Everyone but the most out-of-touch pro-abortion ideologues understands that women carry babies, not "pregnancies," this reality has been heightened by the murders of very pregnant women who very much wanted their babies.
Don't think you have to concede fetal personhood, Saletan assures them. Just make reassuring noises about "the distinct legal significance of unborn human life." Indeed, he intimates, between the lines, if pro-abortionists stop treating the unborn as a "non-entity" (at least verbally), it'll function like the holes in the lid of a tea kettle that allow built-up pressure to be released.
The irony, of course, is that the UVVA was not about abortion at all. The law (as an Associated Press reporter subsequently noted) "exempt[s] the killing of a fetus during an abortion." The pro-abortionists panic because they fear the arrival on the field of their mortal enemy: commonsense and moral intuition.
In her new book, The Spiral Staircase, theologian Karen Armstrong writes about a period in her life which "seemed a hard Lenten journey, but without the prospect of Easter." Armstrong was "repeating the same mistakes, quite unable to see where I was going." But as she would later come to understand, Armstrong all along had been "slowly moving out of the darkness."
As a nation we have made the same lethal mistake over and over again - - pitting the unborn child against her mother and, all too often, ignoring the baby's father altogether. But thanks to the faithful work of people just like you, the light of truth is making it possible for our great nation to gradually "move out of the darkness."
That is a badge of honor you should wear proudly.
Dave Andrusko can be reached at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.