In our lead article, Senator James L. Buckley gives eloquent testimony in behalf of his own beliefs as to what the abortion issue means for all Americans. He does more, we think: for anyone coming upon this controversy for the first time, he provides a wealth of facts and information, an excellent introduction to the general arguments on both sides.

—J.P. McFadden, Introduction, Winter 1975 Human Life Review

____________________________________________

THE Supreme Court, in a pair of highly controversial, precedent shattering decisions, Roe against Wade and Doe against Bolton, ruled that a pregnant woman has a constitutional right to destroy the life of her unborn child. In so doing, the Court not only contravened the express will of every State legislature in the country; it not only removed every vestige of legal protection hitherto enjoyed by the child in the mother’s womb; but it reached its result through a curious and confusing chain of reasoning that, logically extended, could apply with equal force to the genetically deficient infant, the retarded child, or the insane or senile adult.

After reviewing these decisions, I concluded that, given the gravity of the issues at stake and the way in which the Court had carefully closed off alternative means of redress, a constitutional amendment was the only way to remedy the damage wrought by the Court. My decision was not lightly taken for I believe that only matters of permanent and fundamental interest are properly the subject for constitutional amendment. I regret the necessity for having to take this serious step, but the Court’s decisions, unfortunately, leave those who respect human life in all its stages from inception to death with no other recourse.

To those who argue that an amendment to the Constitution affecting abortion and related matters would encumber the document with details more appropriately regulated by statute, I can only reply that the ultimate responsibility must be borne by the High Court itself. With Mr. Justice White, who dissented so vigorously in the abortion cases:

I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court’s judgment.

The Court simply carved out of thin air a previously undisclosed right of “privacy” that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, a right of privacy which, oddly, can be exercised in this instance only by destroying the life and, therefore, the privacy of an unborn child. As Mr. Justice White remarked last January:

As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but in my view its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review which the Constitution extends to this Court.

In the intervening weeks since the Court’s decisions, I have sought the advice of men and women trained in medicine, ethics, and the law. They have given me the most discriminating and exacting counsel on virtually every aspect of the issues involved and have provided invaluable assistance in drawing up an amendment that reflects the latest and best scientific fact, and that comports with our most cherished legal traditions.

What Did the Court Really Do?

Before discussing the specific language of my proposed amendment, I believe it necessary first to analyze the effect and implications of Wade and Bolton, and then to place them in the context of current attacks on our traditional attitudes toward human life. At the outset, it is necessary to discuss with some care what the Court in fact held in its abortion decisions. This is, I must confess, not an easy task. For parsing the Court’s opinions in these cases requires that one attempt to follow a labyrinthine path of argument that simultaneously ignores or confuses a long line of legal precedent and flies in the face of well-established scientific fact.

The Court’s labored reasoning in these cases has been a source of considerable puzzlement to all who have the slightest familiarity with the biological facts of human life before birth or with the legal protections previously provided for the unborn child. The Court’s substantial errors of law and fact have been so well documented by others that it would be superfluous for me to attempt to add anything of my own.

The full import of the Court’s action is as yet incompletely understood by large segments of the public and by many legislators and commentators. It seems to be rather widely held, for example, that the Court authorized abortion on request in the first 6 months of pregnancy, leaving the States free to proscribe the act thereafter. But such is far from the truth. The truth of the matter is that, under these decisions, a woman may at any time during pregnancy exercise a constitutional right to have an abortion provided only that she can find a physician willing to certify that her “health” requires it; and as the word “health” is defined, that in essence means abortion on demand.

The Court attempts to distinguish three stages of pregnancy, but upon examination this attempt yields, in practical effect, distinctions without a difference. In the first 3 months, in the words of the Court, “the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s attending physician.” This means, for all intents and purposes, abortion on request. During the second trimester of pregnancy, the State may—but it need not—regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health. The power of the State’s regulation here is effectively limited to matters of time, place and perhaps manner.

Thus, through approximately the first 6 months of pregnancy, the woman has a constitutionally protected right to take the life of her unborn child, and the State has no “compelling interest” that would justify prohibiting abortion if a woman insists on one.

After the period of “viability,” which the Court marks at 6, or alternatively 7, months of pregnancy, the State “may”—but, again, it need not—proscribe abortion except “where it is necessary for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.” This provision, which appears at first glance to be an important restriction, turns out to be none at all, as the Court defines health to include “psychological as well as physical well-being,” and states that the necessary “medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age relevant to the well-being” of the mother. The Court, in short, has included under the umbrella of “health” just about every conceivable reason a woman might want to advance for having an abortion.

It is clear, then, that at no time prior to natural delivery is the unborn child considered a legal person entitled to constitutional protections; at no time may the unborn child’s life take precedence over the mother’s subjectively based assertion that her well-being is at stake.

In reaching these findings, the Court in effect wrote a statute governing abortion for the entire country, a statute more permissive than that enacted by the hitherto most permissive jurisdiction in the country; namely, my own State of New York. Nor is that all. In the course of its deliberations, the Court found it necessary to concede a series of premises that can lead to conclusions far beyond the immediate question of abortion itself. These premises have to do with the conditions under which human beings, born or unborn, may be said to possess fundamental rights. I would like to touch briefly on one or two basic points:

First, it would now appear that the question of who is or is not a “person” entitled to the full protection of the law is a question of legal definition as opposed to practical determination. Thus, contrary to the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, contrary to the intent of the framers of the 14th amendment, and contrary to previous holdings of the Court, to be created human is no longer a guarantee that one will be possessed of inalienable rights in the sight of the law. The Court has extended to government, it would seem, the power to decide the terms and conditions under which membership in good standing in the human race is determined. This statement of the decisions’ effect may strike many as overwrought, but it will not appear as such to those who have followed the abortion debate carefully or to those who have read the Court’s decisions in full. When, for example, the Court states that the unborn are not recognized by the law as “persons in the whole sense,” and when, further, it uses as a precondition for legal protection the test whether one has a “capability of meaningful life,” a thoughtful man is necessarily invited to speculate on what the logical extension of such arguments might be.

If constitutional rights are deemed to hinge on one’s being a “person in the whole sense,” where does one draw the line between “whole” and something less than “whole”? Is it simply a question of physical or mental development? If so, how does one distinguish between the child in his 23rd week of gestation who is lifted alive from his mother’s womb and allowed to die in the process of abortion by hysterotomy, and the one that is prematurely born and rushed to an incubator? It is a well-known scientific fact that the greater part of a child’s cerebral cortex is not formed, that a child does not become a “cognitive person,” until some months after normal delivery. Might we not someday determine that a child does not become a “whole” person until sometimes after birth, or never become “whole” if born with serious defects? And what about those who, having been born healthy, later lose their mental or physical capacity? Will it one day be found that a person, by virtue of mental illness, or serious accident, or senility, ceases to be a “person in the whole sense,” or ceases to have the “capability for meaningful life,” and as such no longer entitled to the full protection of the law?

The list of such questions is virtually endless. The Court in atempting to solve one problem has ended up by creating 20 others. One can read the Court’s opinions in the abortion cases from beginning to end and back again, but he will not find even the glimmer of an answer to these questions; indeed, one will not even find the glimmer of an indication that the Court was aware that such questions might be raised or might be considered important.

A second general consideration I should like to raise has to do with the Court’s definition of “health” as involving “all factors—physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age-relevant to . . . well-being.”

It is a little remarked but ultimately momentous part of the abortion decisions that the Court, consciously or unconsciously, has adopted wholesale the controversial definition of “health” popularized by the World Health Organization. According to the WHO, “health” is “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, not simply the absence of illness and disease.” In this context, the Court’s definition acquires a special importance, not only because it can be used to justify abortion any time a woman feels discomfited by pregnancy, but because the Court made pointed reference to the “compelling interest” of the State in matters of health in general and maternal health in particular. One is bound to wonder whether the State’s interest in maternal health would ever be sufficiently “compelling” to warrant an abortion against a pregnant woman’s will. This is no mere academic matter. An unwed, pregnant teenage girl was ordered by a lower court in Maryland just last year, against her will, to have an abortion. The girl was able to frustrate the order by running away. The order was later overturned by a Maryland appellate court; but the important point is that an analog to the compelling State interest argument was used by the lower court to justify its holding.

Let us consider, for example, the case of a pregnant mental patient. Would the State’s compelling interest in her health ever be sufficient to force an abortion upon her? What of the unmarried mother on welfare who is already unable to cope with her existing children? Again, I am not raising an academic point for the sake of disputation. In the abortion cases, the Supreme Court breathed life into the notorious precedent of Buck against Bell. The Bell cases, it will be recalled, upheld the right of a State to sterilize a mental incompetent without her consent.

The Court held in that case that—

The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.

One is necessarily bound to wonder whether, by analogous extension, the principle that sustains compulsory sterilization of mental patients is broad enough to cover compulsory abortion of mental patients; and if of mental patients, then why not, as the lower court in Maryland suggested, of unwed minor girls? And if of unwed minor girls, then why not of any other woman? Just how “compelling” is the State’s interest in matters of “health”? Where does the power begin or end? In the abortion cases, Bell curiously is cited for the proposition that a woman does not have an unlimited right to her own body, whence the only inference to be drawn is that the reason she doesn’t have an unlimited right is that the State may qualify that right because of its “compelling interest” in “health.” I find that a strange doctrine to be celebrated by the proponents of women’s liberation.

These larger and deeply troubling considerations may in the long run be as important to us as the special concern that many of us have with the matter of abortion itself. Every premise conceded by the Court in order to justify the killing of an unborn child can be extended to justify the killing of anyone else if, like the unborn child, he is found to be less than a person in the “whole” sense or incapable of “meaningful” life. The removal of all legal restrictions against abortion must, in short, be seen in the light of a changing attitude regarding the sanctity of individual life, the effects of which will be felt not only by the unborn child who is torn from its mother’s womb but as well by all those who may someday fall beyond the arbitrary boundaries of the Court’s definition of humanity.

Which Ethic Will Govern?

This wider context of the abortion controversy was brought to my attention most forcefully by an unusually candid editorial entitled “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society” that was published two and a half years ago in California Medicine, the official journal of the California Medical Association. It was occasioned, as I understand it, by the debate then taking place in our largest State regarding the liberalization of the abortion law.

The thrust of the editorial is simply this: That the controversy over abortion represents the first phase of a head-on conflict between the traditional, Judeo-Christian medical and legal ethic—in which the intrinsic worth and equal value of every human life is secured by law, regardless of age, health or condition of dependency—and a new ethic, according to which human life can be taken for what are held to be the compelling social, economic or psychological needs of others. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the editorial referred to be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

Let me for a moment dwell on a crucial point in that editorial. The author writes:

The process of eroding the old ethic and substituting the new has already begun. It may be seen most clearly in changing attitudes toward human abortion. In defiance of the long held Western ethic of intrinsic and equal value for every human life regardless of its stage, condition, or status, abortion is becoming accepted by society as moral, right, and even necessary. It is worth noting that this shift in public attitude has affected the churches, the laws and public policy rather than the reverse. Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intraor extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected.

Lest there be any ambiguity as to the ultimate thrust of the “new ethic,” the California Medicine editorial went on to state the following in discussing the growing role of physicians in deciding who will and will not live:

One may anticipate further development of these roles as the problems of birth control and birth selection are extended inevitably to death selection and death control whether by the individual or by society . . .

I find the editorial a powerful, eloquent, and compelling statement of the ultimate questions involved in the abortion controversy. The question in issue—the Supreme Court to the contrary notwithstanding—is not to determine when life begins, for that is one of scientific fact requiring neither philosophical nor theological knowledge to answer. The question, rather, is what value we shall place on human life in general and whether unborn human life in particular is entitled to legal protection.

Whether or not our society shall continue its commitment to the old ethic, or transfer its allegiance to the new, is not a question to be decided by a transitory majority of the Supreme Court, but by the people acting through their political processes. I concur in Mr. Justice White’s condemnation of the Wade decision as “an exercise of raw judicial power” that is “improvident and extravagant.” I concur in finding unacceptable the Court’s action in “interposing a constitutional barrier to State efforts to protect human life and—in investing mothers and doctors with the constitutionally protected right to exterminate it.”

The majority of the Court, however, has rendered its decision. We as a people have been committed by seven men to the “new ethic”; and because of the finality of their decisions, because there are now no practical curbs on the killing of the unborn to suit the convenience or whim of the mother, those who continue to believe in the old ethic have no recourse but to resort to the political process. That is why I intend to do what I can to give the American people the opportunity to determine for themselves which ethic will govern this country in what is, after all, quite literally a matter of life or death. That is why I send my proposed Human Life Amendment to the desk and ask that it be printed and appropriately referred.

The Proposed Amendment

In doing so, Mr. President, may I say how deeply gratified I am to be joined in introducing this amendment by my distinguished colleagues from Oregon, Iowa, Utah, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and North Dakota. Senators Hatfield, Hughes, Bennett, Bartlett, Curtis, and Young* are known in this body and elsewhere as exceptionally thoughtful and dedicated men whose day-to-day political activities are informed by devotion to first principles. When such a geographically, ideologically, and religiously diverse group of senators can agree on a major issue like this, it suggests that opposition to abortion is truly ecumenical and national in scope. These senators honor me by their cosponsorship, and I consider it a privilege to work together with them in this great cause. I would simply like to take this occasion to extend to each of them my personal gratitude for their help and cooperation and to say how much I look forward to working jointly with them in the months ahead.

The text of our amendment reads as follows:

Section 1. With respect to the right to life, the word “person”, as used in this Article and in the Fifth and Fourteenth Articles of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, applies to all human beings, including their unborn offspring at every stage of their biological development, irrespective of age, health, function or condition or dependency.

Section 2. This Article shall not apply in an emergency when a reasonable medical certainty exists that continuation of the pregnancy will cause the death of the mother.

Section 3. Congress and the several States shall have power to enforce this Article by appropriate legislation within their respective jurisdictions.

The amendment’s central purpose is to create, or rather, as will be made clear below, to restore a constitutionally compelling identity between the biological category “human being” and the legal category “person.” This has been made necessary by two factors: First, the more or less conscious dissemblance on the part of abortion proponents, by virtue of which the universally agreed upon facts of biology are made to appear as questions of value—a false argument that the Supreme Court adopted wholesale; and second, the holding of the Court in Wade and Bolton that the test of personhood is one of legal rather than of biological definition. The amendment addresses these difficulties by making the biological test constitutionally binding, on the ground that only such a test will restrain the tendency of certain courts and legislatures to arrogate to themselves the power to determine who is or who is not human and, therefore, who is or is not entitled to constitutional protections. The amendment is founded on the belief that the ultimate safeguard of all persons, born or unborn, normal or defective, is to compel courts and legislatures to rest their decisions on scientific fact rather than on political, sociological, or other opinion.

Such a test will return the law to a position compatible with the original understanding of the 14th amendment. As the debates in Congress during consideration of that amendment make clear, it was precisely the intention of Congress to make “legal person” and “human being” synonymous categories. By so doing, Congress wrote into the Constitution that understanding of the Declaration of Independence best articulated by Abraham Lincoln; namely, that to be human is to possess certain rights by nature, rights that no court and no legislature can legitimately remove. Chief among these, of course, is the right to life.

On the specific subject of abortion, it is notable that the same men who passed the 14th amendment also enacted an expanded Assimilative Crimes Statute, April 1866, which adopted recently passed State anti-abortion statutes. These statutes, in turn, had been enacted as a result of a concerted effort by medical societies to bring to legislators’ attention the recently discovered facts of human conception. The Court’s opinion in Wade totally misreads—if the Court was aware of it at all—the fascinating medico-legal history of the enactment of 19th century antiabortion statutes, and ignores altogether the fundamental intention which animated the framers of the 14th amendment.

Section 1 of the proposed amendment would restore and make explicit the biological test for legal protection of human life. The generic category is “human being,” which includes, but is not limited to, “unborn offspring—at every stage of their biological development.” It is a question of biological fact as to what constitutes “human being” and as to when “offspring” may be said to come into existence. While the basic facts concerning these matters are not in dispute among informed members of the scientific community, the ways in which these facts are to be ascertained in any particular case will depend on the specifications contained in implementing legislation passed consistent with the standard established by the amendment. Such legislation would have to consider, in the light of the best available scientific information, the establishment of reasonable standards for determining when a woman is in fact pregnant, and if so, what limitations are to be placed on the performance of certain medical procedures or the administering of certain drugs.

Section 1, it will also be noted, reaches the more general case of euthanasia. This is made necessary because of the widespread and growing talk of legalizing “death with dignity,” and because of the alarming dicta in the Wade opinion by which legal protection seems to be conditioned on whether one has the “capability of meaningful life” or whether one is a “person in the whole sense.” Such language in the Court’s opinion, when combined with the Court’s frequent references to the State’s “compelling interest” in matters of “health,” is pointedly brought to our attention by the revival in Wade of the notorious 1927 case of Buck against Bell—which upheld the right of the State to sterilize a mentally defective woman without her consent. The Wade and Bolton opinions taken as a whole seem to suggest that unborn children are not the only ones whose right to life is now legally unprotected. Thus, the proposed amendment explicitly extends its protections to all those whose physical or mental condition might make them especially vulnerable victims of the “new ethic.”

Regarding the specific subject of abortion, section 2 makes an explicit exception for the life of the pregnant woman. There seems to be a widespread misimpression that pregnancy is a medically dangerous condition, when the truth of the matter is that under most circumstances a pregnant woman can deliver her child with minimal risk to her own life and health. There is, however, an exceedingly small class of pregnancies where continuation of pregnancy will cause the death of the woman. The most common example is the ectopic or tubal pregnancy. It is our intention to exempt this unique class of pregnancies, without opening the door to spurious claims of risk of death.

Under the amendment, there must be an emergency in which reasonable medical certainty exists that continuation of pregnancy will cause the death of the woman. This is designed to cover the legitimate emergency cases, such as the ectopic pregnancy, while closing the door to unethical physicians who in the past have been willing to sign statements attesting to risk of death when in fact none exists or when the prospect is so remote in time or circumstance as to be unrelated to the pregnancy. Contrary to the opinion of the Supreme Court, which assumes that pregnancy is a pathological state, modern obstetrical advances have succeeded in removing virtually every major medical risk once associated with pregnancy. As Dr. Alan Guttmacher himself remarked nearly a decade ago, modern obstetrical practice has eliminated almost all medical indications for abortion. In certain limited instances, however, a genuine threat to the woman’s life remains, and it is felt that excepting such situations is compatible with long-standing moral custom and legal tradition.

What Kind of Society?

I profoundly believe that such popularity, as the idea of abortion has acquired, derives from the ability of the proponents of abortion to dissemble the true facts concerning the nature of unborn life and the true facts concerning what is actually involved in abortion. I further believe that when these facts are fully made known to the public, they will reject abortion save under the most exigent circumstances; that is, those in which the physical life of the mother is itself at stake. In recent weeks, in discussing this matter with friends and colleagues, I have found that, like many of the rest of us, they labor under certain misimpressions created by the proponents of permissive abortion. I, therefore, believe that it would be useful for me to call our colleagues’ attention to clinical evidence upon these points.

First, I will quote a particularly felicitous description of the biological and physical character of the unborn child by Dr. A. W. Liley, research professor in fetal physiology at National Women’s Hospital, Auckland, New Zealand, a man renowned throughout the world as one of the principal founders and masters of the relatively new field of fetology. Dr. Liley writes:

In a world in which adults control power and purse, the fetus is at a disadvantage being small, naked, nameless and voiceless. He has no one except sympathetic adults to speak up for him and defend him—and equally no one except callous adults to condemn and attack him. Mr. Peter Stanley of Langham Street Clinic, Britain’s largest and busiest private abortorium with nearly 7,000 abortions per year, can assure us that “under 28 weeks the foetus is so much garbage—there is no such thing as a living foetus.” Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a prominent New York abortionist, can complain that it is difficult to get nurses to aid in abortions beyond the twelfth week because the nurses and often the doctors emotionally assume that a large foetus is more human than a small one. But when Stanley and Nathanson profit handsomely from abortion we can question their detachment because what is good for a doctor’s pocket may not be best for mother or baby.

Biologically, at no stage can we subscribe to the view that the foetus is a mere appendage of the mother. Genetically, mother and baby are separate individuals from conception, physiologically, we must accept that the conceptus is, in very large measure, in charge of the pregnancy, in command of his own environment and destiny with a tenacious purpose.

It is the early embryo who stops mother’s periods and proceeds to induce all manner of changes in maternal physiology to make his mother a suitable host for him. Although women speak of their waters breaking or their membranes rupturing, these structures belong to the foetus and he regulates his own amniotic fluid volume. It is the foetus who is responsible for the immunological success of pregnancy—the dazzling achievement by which foetus and mother, although immunological foreigners, tolerate each other in parabiosis for nine months. And finally it is the foetus, not the mother, who decides when labour should be initiated.

One hour after the sperm has penetrated the ovum, the nuclei of the two cells have fused and the genetic instructions from one parent have met the complementary instructions from the other parent to establish the whole design, the inheritance of a new person. The one cell divides into two, the two into four and so on while over a span of 7 or 8 days this ball of cells traverses the Fallopian tube to reach the uterus.

On reaching the uterus, this young individual implants in the spongy lining and with a display of physiological power suppresses his mother’s menstrual period. This is his home for the next 270 days and to make it habitable the embryo develops a placenta and a protective capsule of fluid for himself. By 25 days the developing heart starts beating, the first strokes of a pump that will make 3,000 million beats in a lifetime. By 30 days and just 2 weeks past mother’s first missed period, the baby, ¼ inch long, has a brain of unmistakable human proportions, eyes, ears, mouth, kidneys, liver and umbilical cord and a heart pumping blood he has made himself. By 45 days, about the time of mother’s second missed period, the baby’s skeleton is complete, in cartilage not bone, the buds of the milk teeth appear and he makes his first movements of his limbs and body—although it will be another 12 weeks before mother notices movements. By 63 days he will grasp an object placed in his palm and can make a fist.

Most of our studies of foetal behavior have been made later in pregnancy, partly because we lack techniques for investigation earlier and partly because it is only the exigencies of late pregnancy which provide us with opportunities to invade the privacy of the foetus. We know that he moves with a delightful easy grace in his buoyant world, that foetal comfort determines foetal position. He is responsive to pain and touch and cold and sound and light. He drinks his amniotic fluid, more if it is artificially sweetened and less if it is given an unpleasant taste. He gets hiccups and sucks his thumb. He wakes and sleeps. He gets bored with repetitive signals but can be taught to be alerted by a first signal for a second different one. Despite all that has been written by poets and song writers, we believe babies cry at birth because they have been hurt. In all the discussions that have taken place on pain relief in labour, only the pain of mothers have been been considered—no one has bothered to think of the baby.

This then is the foetus we know and indeed each once were. This is the foetus we look after in modern obstetrics, the same baby we are caring for before and after birth, who before birth can be ill and need diagnosis and treatment just like any other patient. This is also the foetus whose existence and identity must be so callously ignored or energetically denied by advocates of abortion.

I consider this issue to be of paramount importance. As we stand here on this day, quite literally thousands of unborn children will be sacrificed before the sun sets in the name of the new ethic. Such a situation cannot continue indefinitely without doing irreparable damage to the most cherished principles of humanity and to the moral sensibilities of our people. The issue at stake is not only what we do to unborn children, but what we do to ourselves by permitting them to be killed. With every day that passes, we run the risk of stumbling, willy-nilly, down the path that leads inexorably to the devaluation of all stages of human life, born or unborn. But a few short years ago, a moderate liberalization of abortion was being urged upon us. The most grievous hypothetical circumstances were cast before us to justify giving in a little bit here, a little bit there; and step by step, with the inevitability of gradualness, we were led to the point where, now, we no longer have any valid legal constraints on abortion.

What kind of society is it that will abide this sort of senseless destruction? What kind of people are we that can tolerate this mass extermination? What kind of Constitution is it that can elevate this sort of conduct to the level of a sacrosanct right, presumptively endowed with the blessings of the Founding Fathers, who looked to the laws of nature and of nature’s God as the foundation of this nation? Abortion, which was once universally condemned in the Western World as a heinous moral and legal offense, is now presented to us as not only a necessary, sometime evil, but as a morally and socially beneficial act. The Christian counsel of perfection which teaches that the greatest love consists in laying down one’s life for one’s friend, has now become, it seems, an injunction to take another’s life for the security and comfort of one’s own. Men who one day argue against the killing of innocent human life in war will be found the next arguing in praise of killing innocent human life in the womb. Doctors foresworn to apply the healing arts to save life now dedicate themselves and their skills to the destruction of life.

To enter the world of abortion on request, Mr. President, is to enter a world that is upside down: It is a world in which black becomes white, and right wrong, a world in which the powerful are authorized to destroy the weak and defenseless, a world in which the child’s natural protector, his own mother, becomes the very agent of his destruction.

I urge my colleagues to join me in protecting the lives of all human beings, born and unborn, for their sake, for our own sake, for the sake of our children, and for the sake of all those who may someday become the victims of the new ethic.

_________________________________________________

*Shortly thereafter, these senators were joined by Senator James O. Eastland, Democrat, of Mississippi and Senator Jesse Helms, Republican, of North Carolina.

 

_________________________________________________

Bio from this issue:

James L. Buckley (1923-2023), a federal judge and senator from New York, introduced his Human Life Amendment on May 31, 1973, four months after Roe v. Wade made unlimited abortion legal in all fifty states. This article is a slightly abridged version of his address to the Senate that day. Mr. Buckley was honored by the Human Life Foundation as a Great Defender of Life in 2012.