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NRL News The
Fundamental Question That Is in Dispute
"Physician participation in assisted suicide or euthanasia may have
a profound harmful emotional toll on the involved physicians. ...
Doctors must take responsibility for causing the patient's death.
There is a huge burden on conscience, tangled emotions and a large
psychological toll on the participating physicians."
"Figures
released by the Office of National Statistics [in England] showed
dozens of babies had been aborted because they had club feet, webbed
fingers or other minor deformities."
"And here
we come to the fundamental question in dispute; that question can be
described in different ways: whether all human beings have a right
not to be killed; whether membership in the human species is enough
to confer rights; whether we accept the existence of a category of
human non-persons. Opponents of abortion, embryo-destructive
research, euthanasia, and infanticide believe that all human begins
should be protected from being killed. They believe, further, that
to the extent America fails to provide this protection it betrays
its own founding principles. The party of death, on the other hand,
believes that some human beings deserve that protection and some do
not." I began this editorial the Tuesday after Memorial Day. Driving in I listened to a talk show host plead that we consider every day Memorial Day. She meant by this that we should constantly remember those who have served our great nation, not just the last Monday in May, but 365 days a year. It immediately struck me that this is how we already commemorate those whose lives have been lost to, or maimed by, the Culture of Death. While we don't have parades or commemorative ceremonies, each of us grieves in our heart, knowing that it is a rare day that the killing machine stands idle. Since the stakes are so high, we can not afford the luxury of being either Pollyannaish or sentimentalists. Pro-lifers are fully aware that even as we take steps forward--for example, to expose the truth that RU486 not only kills unborn babies but can be lethally dangerous to their mothers--the engines of death are roaring someplace else. The Abortion Establishment in Great Britain, for example, is rubbing its hands in glee. According to its largest "abortion provider," the use of powerful two-drug abortion technique has doubled in a year. It is now used to snuff out almost a third of the 32,000 abortions performed by the BPAS, formerly known as the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, roughly the equivalent of our Planned Parenthood, according to the Times of London. If that weren't horrific enough, numbers released by the Office of National Statistics May 28 showed that between 1996 and 2004 more than 20 children with club feet and four babies with webbed or extra fingers were aborted in England. All of the unborn babies were more than 20 weeks old. Naomi Davis, a pediatric surgeon who specializes in correcting club feet, told the Times of London, "I think it's reasonable to be totally shocked that abortion is being offered for this. It is entirely treatable." She added, "I can only think it is lack of information." But, alas, it is not just the British who collectively grow less and less accepting of less than "perfect" babies. Changing this eugenics attitude--for that is what it is--presents one of our most formidable worldwide challenges. But there is so much about which to be encouraged. All of these many positive trend lines will be discussed at NRLC's annual convention in Nashville. Although we have reached the eleventh hour--the convention is June 22–24--I hope some who might not have planned to attend the entire three-day education fest will make it for at least a day. What attendees will be shown is abundant evidence that the rules of the game have changed. It's no longer business as usual for the PPFAs and NARALs. The "right" to off unborn children, once thought to be cemented into place, is under siege. The jackhammers are at work--an energized Movement, a huge infusion of young people who have turned their backs on abortion on demand, the consciousness-raising impact of ultrasound technology, and a gradual realization that pro-abortionists have failed to deliver on their promises. You remember the campfire story version: all children would be "wanted," women would be "liberated," and the wider society would benefit by dissolving the assumption that parents are obliged to protect their children, born and unborn. Instead, abortion remains the bone in the throat of contemporary culture on which we continue to choke. For the longest time, the Abortion Establishment thought it had delivered a knockout punch. Then, as their fortunes declined, they thought they could just ride out the storm. Eventually, they reassured themselves, the hue and cry would just fade away. The Pro-Life Movement would eventually be rendered as powerless as an artifact. Instead the demand that the unborn be protected grows louder and more insistent. No better proof of this could be provided than the frantic efforts of the national leadership of the Democratic Party which is scrambling to find a vocabulary which sounds less hostile but which commits the party to preventing not a single abortion. Sen. Clinton, for obvious reasons, is the prime example of the abortion shuffle. In the same speech last January in which she dropped the platitudes about abortion her husband honed a decade earlier (it's a "tragedy"), she lambasted pro-lifers unmercifully. Supposedly searching for "common ground," she not-so-subtly placed abortion foes in the company of a whacko Romanian dictator and the forced abortion program in China. In addition Sen. Clinton continued to polish the lie that abortions rose under President George W. Bush and declined under her husband. (You have to wonder what her answer would be if you asked her if she really--cross-her-heart-hope-to-die--believes this.) A final thought: Probably because I have such an enormous amount of text and photos saved on my hard drive, my computer is giving me fits today. But I am sensible enough to realize that the problem is not a flaw in my PC but in the way I use it. By contrast, take the crew that occupies PPFA and NARAL and the leadership of the national Democratic Party that merrily promotes abortion now and forever and for any reason or no reason. When they see their electoral fortunes sinking, they attribute this setback to some bug in the system. But the truth is that it's not some minor defect that is causing them all their headaches but a designer flaw. The American people are already waking up to a grim truth: they've been had by an ideology that is designed to appeal to the worst in them and which is rotten to the core. The downward spiral that began with the acceptance of what was supposed to be limited to "hard case" abortion has already descended to where the presence of the most minor, completely correctable "flaw" is reason enough to take the life of an unborn child. This descent can only be reversed by the hearty embrace of all of God's children, born and unborn. Thanks to you, this has already begun to happen. And as more and more Americans see the unborn as the Littlest Americans, the mythology that sustains the killing machinery will itself wither and die. |