INTRODUCTION

Needless to say, we are at an intense moment in the history of the pro-life movement. Although there is fervent new reaction and commentary every day in the press, we think it is also a moment to take a deep breath and reflect on some fundamental questions:  Why is the abortion issue one that continues to divide us; why has it not become “settled”? And how much has really changed in this decades-long struggle?

In our ponderings, we reached back into the Human Life Review’s archives, and were amazed when we revisited Malcolm Muggeridge’s prophetic “What the Abortion Argument Is About.” It was 1975, and the great British journalist—and HLR’s editor-at-large—had already mapped out the road from Roe to infanticide to euthanasia, anticipating all of the milestones—e.g., live-birth abortion, fetal experimentation and commercialization, the deferral of human rights until after delivery. He ends with a warning:

. . . the abortion controversy is the most vital and relevant of all. For we can survive energy crises, inflation, wars, revolutions and insurrections, as they have been survived in the past; but if we transgress against the very basis of our mortal existence, becoming our own gods in our own universe, then we shall surely and deservedly perish from the earth.

Our other bookend, if you will, is a recent syndicated column by our senior editor, William Murchison. He casts a brilliant backward glance at Roe and then writes:

It seems hardly likely today’s high court, given the crackling tensions of the moment, would try to throw a 46-year-old revolution completely into reverse. To be sure, in older times, the justices would never have volunteered themselves as moral arbiters. In the age of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, they should have known better than to try and reframe our moral norms—given the moral law’s ancient antecedents, and its claims on democratic thought and action.

Some more questions: Is, as Muggeridge believed, the transgression of abortion a potential threat to human survival? Could the moral law’s ancient antecedents be revived? Could the country’s traditional Judeo-Christian identity reassert itself, so that abortion might once again become virtually “unthinkable”?

We posed these questions to several people who have long labored in the pro-life movement. Their responses follow the Muggeridge and Murchison commentaries which are reprinted here.

Maria McFadden Maffucci, Editor

Anne Conlon, Managing Editor

 

Jump to:

Malcolm Muggeridge     William Murchison    William McGurn    Anne Conlon     

Christopher Bell    Anne Hendershott   Chuck Donovan   Kathryn Jean Lopez  

 

 

Malcolm Muggeridge

What the Abortion Argument Is About

Generally, when some drastic readjustment of accepted moral values, such as is involved by legalized abortion, is under consideration, once the decisive legislative step is taken the consequent change in mores soon comes to be more or less accepted, and controversy dies down. This happened, for instance, with the legalization of homosexual practices of consenting adults.

Why, then, has it not happened with the legalization of abortion? Surely because the abortion issue raises questions of the very destiny and purpose of life itself; of whether our human society is to be seen in Christian terms as a family with a loving father who is God, or as a factory-farm whose primary consideration must be the physical well-being of the livestock and the material well-being of the collectivity.

This explains why individuals with no very emphatic conscious feelings about abortion one way or the other, react very strongly to particular aspects of it. Thus, nurses who are not anti-abortion zealots cannot bring themselves to participate in abortion operations, though perfectly prepared to take in what are ostensibly more gruesome medical experiences.

Again, the practice of using for experiment live fetuses removed from a womb in abortion arouses a sense of horror in nearly everyone quite irrespective of their views on abortion as such.

Why is this, if the fetus is just a lump of jelly, as the pro-abortionists have claimed, and not to be considered a human child until it emerges from its mother’s womb? What does it matter what happens to a lump of jelly? What, for that matter, is the objection to using discarded fetuses in the manufacture of cosmetics—a practice that the most ardent abortionist is liable to find distasteful? We use animal fats for the purpose. Then why not a fetus’s which would otherwise just be thrown away with the rest of the contents of a surgical bucket?

It is on the assumption that a fetus does not become a child until it is actually delivered that the whole case for legalized abortion rests. To destroy a developing fetus in the womb, sometimes as late as seven months after conception, is considered by the pro-abortionists an act of compassion. To destroy the same fetus two months later when it has been born, is, in law, murder—vide Lord  Hailsham’s contention  that  “an embryo which is delivered alive is a human being and is protected by the law of murder . . . any experiments on it are covered by the law of assault affecting criminal assault on human beings.”

Can it be seriously contended that the mere circumstance of being delivered transforms a developing embryo from a lump of jelly with no rights of any kind, and deserving of no consideration of any kind, into a human being with all the legal rights that go therewith? In the case of a pregnant woman injured in a motor accident, damages can be claimed on behalf of the child in her womb. Similarly, in the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, special mention is made of its entitlement to pre- as well as post-natal care. It is a strange sort of pre-natal care which permits the removal of the child from its mother’s womb, to be tossed into an incinerator, or used for “research,” or rendered down for cosmetics.

Our Western way of life has come to a parting of the ways; time’s takeover bid for eternity has reached the point at which irrevocable decisions have to be taken. Either we go on with the process of shaping our own destiny without reference to any higher being than Man, deciding ourselves how many children shall be born when and in what varieties, which lives are worth continuing and which should be  put  out, from whom spare-parts—kidneys, hearts, genitals,  brainboxes even—shall be taken and to whom allotted.

Or we draw back, seeking to understand and fall in with our Creator’s purpose for us rather than to pursue our own; in true humility praying, as the founder of our religion and our civilization taught us: Thy will be done.

This is what the abortion controversy is about, and what the euthanasia controversy will be about when, as must inevitably happen soon, it arises. The logical sequel to the destruction of what are called “unwanted children” will be the elimination of what will be called “unwanted lives”—a legislative measure which so far in all human history only the Nazi Government has ventured to enact.

In this sense the abortion controversy is the most vital and relevant of all. For we can survive energy crises, inflation, wars, revolutions, and insurrections as they have been survived in the past; but if we transgress against the very basis of our mortal existence, becoming our own gods in our own universe, then we shall surely and deservedly perish from the earth.

—Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) was a renowned British author, journalist, and TV personality, and for several years, an editor-at-large of the Human Life Review, in which “What the Abortion Argument Is About” was first reprinted in 1975.

 

William Murchison

Abortion: The People Are Catching On

So. When the U.S. Supreme Court numbered abortion among our precious constitutional rights, we expected everlasting bliss? Anything but the present knock-down, drag-out over Roe v. Wade and its prospects for survival?

I mean, we’re stunned to see state legislatures moving to outlaw abortion? Why? On what grounds? America is presently absorbing a major political science lesson; to wit, a social revolution commenced and overseen by a coterie of philosopher kings—Platonic guardians, you could say—is a non-starter. Won’t work. We generally don’t do business that way in America.

Roe v. Wade was a notable exception to the seemingly odd notion that the governed and those who govern them should work hand in hand, so as to maximize consent and minimize anger of the sort deadly to peace and unity. You negotiate rivalries, see? You don’t turn to a body of semi-Solomons, saying, tell us what’s right—we’re too dumb to figure it out for ourselves.

It’s been more than 46 years since Roe. Ah, the changes we’ve seen! Back then we still conversed with telephone operators. The odor of lighted cigarettes enveloped commercial airliners, and the Nixons were our presidential royalty.

Forty-six years has not rendered America amenable to the divinations of seven intellectually polished law school graduates—two colleagues dissented—who revealed something previously unsuspected by the dumb peasants. An expectant mother, the court majority said, enjoyed the constitutional right to decide whether or not to give birth. As for any constitutional rights the baby might enjoy—we surely have gleaned by now here we have an entirely different matter!

Up to 1973, the several states had spoken to the matter of abortion through elected legislatures and the weighing of competing interests. The great majority of state laws emphasized protection for the not-yet-born as opposed to solicitousness for the mother’s choice.

At that, nothing was engraved in marble, with guards on hand to shoo away proponents of change. The self-liberating 60s produced a growing clamor for liberalization of the abortion laws. Gov. Ronald Reagan of California signed in 1967 the California Therapeutic Abortion Act, enacted on the grounds that the law forbidding abortion except to save a woman’s life was in fact responsible for 18,000 illegal abortions—during many of which the mother (non-white in four fifths of the cases) died. Nor, in any case, was the law regularly enforced. The new law allowed abortion for protection of the mother’s health, as well as for pregnancies due to rape or incest.

Whether correct or incorrect, the legislature’s chosen solution reflected popular acceptance: the consequence of open argumentation over a period of six years. No semi-Solomons handed it down from the throne. Its passage by elected lawmakers meant a different set of elected lawmakers could write a law with new or few specifications—in line, more or less, with voter preferences. The rest of the 50 states were free to do likewise. Or do nothing at all.

There followed Roe v. Wade—the proclamation, on dubious constitutional grounds, of a national abortion policy. The states could enact weak protections for unborn life. Strong protections? Naaah.

Which is what brings us to this present moment, with Alabama and several other states writing into statute the human life protections favored, presumably, by their own citizen-electors, rather than by the semi-Solomons.

It seems hardly likely today’s high court, given the crackling tensions of the moment, would try to throw a 46-year-old revolution completely into reverse. To be sure, in older times, the justices would never have volunteered themselves as moral arbiters. In the age of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, they should have known better than to try and reframe our moral norms—given the moral law’s ancient antecedents, and its claims on democratic thought and action.

Nonetheless, inasmuch as morals and politics often intertwine and contradict each other, here we are: the semi-Solomons at odds with, as polls suggest, nearly half the populace. What a dim and destructive decision, Roe v. Wade. That much the supposedly sovereign people are beginning to figure out for themselves.

Copyright 2019 Creators Syndicate

—William Murchison is writing a book on moral restoration in the 21st century.

 

William McGurn

If abortion is to be measured by Roe v. Wade—the Supreme Court decision that overturned the laws of all fifty states to discover a constitutional right to abortion—not a thing has changed since it was decided in 1973.

Roe remains in place. Yet though it is commonly referred to as “settled law,” defenders give the impression that it is the least settled law in the land. They go into conniptions each time a Supreme Court seat comes open, especially if it happens during a Republican administration when there’s a sporting chance the seat will go to someone who in fact believes in the Constitution.

Today there are new challenges to Roe, such as the state bans that would outlaw the practice after a heartbeat is detected. But the Court’s recent decision to take a pass on an Indiana law prohibiting abortion on account of race, sex, or disability—thought to be the path for a more modest assault on Roe—suggests there are not yet the votes to take on Roe.

The history, moreover, is not encouraging. Though it is almost certain for a new Roe challenge to make its way to the Supreme Court, it is quite possible the Court will once again play Lucy to Charlie Brown—lifting the football up before he can kick so he lands flat on his back. That’s surely what happened in Casey in 1992. Anthony Kennedy pulled a Lucy, siding with the liberals to gut the holdings of Roe but keep the outcome.

Perhaps this will change as more states pass restrictions and bans and force the courts to pay attention. In his concurring opinion in the decision declining to take up the Indiana law, Clarence Thomas suggested it might be best if these things percolated through the appellate courts first.

So in this particular sense, here we are almost a half century later, and Roe remains intact. But in perhaps a more important sense, the pro-life movement is better placed than it’s ever been.

Prolifers have the young, after all. How disconcerting it must be to those aging, wrinkled, pro-Roe grey heads to have to watch the busloads of young people stepping off those buses every January to March for Life. I know the transformation up close: As a Notre Dame student in 1977, I traveled to the March on the bus with a local parish from South Bend. The only other college student from South Bend was a girl from Saint Mary’s, a senior. This year more than 1,000 Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s, and Holy Cross students made the long and difficult trip—young, enthusiastic, undeterred.

The signs of these young people proclaim, “We are the pro-life generation.” But by everything Americans were told about abortion the past fifty years, there shouldn’t be any pro-life generation. When Roe was handed down, the New York Times editorialized that the Court had brought “an end to the emotional and divisive public argument.” Likewise in 1992, when Justice Kennedy in Casey imperiously called “contending sides of a national controversy to end their national division” by embracing, well, Kennedy’s opinion.

And yet … and yet. Some 45 years later, here they are, more committed to defending the unborn than the generations before them. Somehow they didn’t get the message that the debate is supposed to be over. Somehow they know that a woman who finds herself alone with an unplanned pregnancy deserves better than the cold front door of a Planned Parenthood clinic. Can I confess I take an almost illicit pleasure in this?

The prochoice arguments are simply not persuading the new generations. I’m old enough to remember when the unborn child was dismissed as a “blob of protoplasm.” Sonograms have changed this. Today the soi-disant “party of science” takes the position that the life in a woman’s womb is a baby if that’s how she chooses to talk about it, but an alien mass of tissue if she chooses to abort. Likewise today’s claim that the fetal heartbeat is nothing more than “a group of cells with electrical activity” when first detected.

But the main benefit of the heartbeat bills may be more educational than constitutional. Whether or not the Court accepts it, ordinary people know a heartbeat is a sign of a separate human life. It confirms what we are talking about.

For Roe, after all, isn’t the target. Far more than the overturning of Roe, our real project is to build a culture of life where Roe is unthinkable. And restoring a culture constitutes a far more daunting challenge than the overturning of a Court decision.

But no one ever said life is easy. What we say is that life is beautiful. Even when—maybe especially when—it’s messy and complicated.

Today, amid the soul-sucking cult of self that leaves so many Americans feeling so dreadfully alone and unloved, the prolifers’ work on behalf of the least among us makes them increasingly attractive. Even to those who can’t explain why. And this is our real hope, the one thing that has changed, so dramatically, since Roe.

—William McGurn writes the Main Street column for the Wall Street Journal.

 

Anne Conlon

Was abortion ever unthinkable? No. There were plenty of abortions before Roe v. Wade. It was, however, “unthinkable,” a taboo, usually performed by shady characters in back alleys on the wrong side of town. Some women performed coat-hanger procedures on themselves. Others drank potions, punched their bellies, “fell” down stairs. Such was their desperation, they risked their own lives to expel the new life they were carrying. Yet it wasn’t until well into the 20th century, when some Park Avenue doctors started quietly obliging their patients, that a movement to make abortion respectable coalesced.

The push for legal abortion in the 1960s coincided with sudden mass awareness of what fetal life really looked like: In 1965, Life magazine reprinted 16 four-color photographs from the just-published A Child Is Born, Swedish photojournalist Lennart Nilsson’s classic chronicle of pregnancy from conception to birth. The startling, never-before-seen images of fetal development simultaneously appeared in Britain’s Sunday Times and in Paris Match. Not the earth-spanning reach of today’s media, but enough to command global attention. Life’s run of eight million copies sold out in four days. Nilsson’s book, with explanatory text by medical experts, has sold millions of copies (in five revised editions) and been translated into 20 languages.

A Child Is Born opened the womb to Western eyes five years before abortion was legalized in New York State (and England), eight years before Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade, wrote that

We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.

Pace Justice Blackmun, the (centuries-old) public consensus in 1973 was that human life began at conception. Anyone who studied biology in high school knew this. (Not to mention the tens of millions who had seen Nilsson’s photographs.) So how is it that feminists and other abortion advocates could use—with impunity—terms like “clumps of cells” to dehumanize their unborn brothers and sisters? How did such a preposterous claim stand virtually unchallenged by those trained in the disciplines of medicine and science, people intimately acquainted with embryology textbooks and miscarried fetal remains?

The proliferation of sonography in the last few decades is credited with changing especially younger minds about abortion. (Though, according to polls, most still want abortion to remain legal.) Sonograms personalized what Nilsson documented in anonymous photographs. The image taped to the fridge isn’t anonymous. It’s “my baby.” The cradle is waiting upstairs. But is that a baby? Or a clump of cells? In fact, we are all clumps of cells, but so far no one is using that as a reason to kill us—well, unless we are “vegetative” clumps like Terri Schiavo. Or, more recently, and again New York leads the way, a clump of cells that has survived an abortion procedure or been delivered as damaged goods.

I think we must acknowledge that an elite consensus on the baby vs. clump question does exist, and probably did when Roe was decided. Indeed, it was spelled out by Barack Obama in his heralded 2009 Notre Dame Graduation Speech, which, ironically, coincided with the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, “the first major step,” the president told a cheering crowd at South Bend, “in dismantling the separate but equal doctrine.” Ironic because Obama essentially went on to call for a separate but equal doctrine on abortion:

I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away . . . the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature . . . maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually, it has both moral and spiritual dimensions.

The (largely Catholic) crowd continued to cheer.

Mr. Obama no doubt had seen images of the unborn child—likely sonograms of his own daughters. Still, what he was asking us to accept, in an address praised for its “civil tone,” was that pregnancy could have two separate tracks, each of equal moral and spiritual weight. On one track a “mother” delivers a “baby” from her “womb” after nine months; on the other track a “woman” has nine months to decide whether or not to abort a “clump of cells” occupying her “uterus.”

This proposition is the fruit of what Pope Benedict called the dictatorship of relativism, a language-based regime—debased, deceitful language—that has already consigned one of the iconic images of Western civilization—mother and child—to greeting card status and is now busy cashiering the age-old consensus that “male and female He created them.” Again we are seeing a preposterous claim—“gender fluidity”—stand virtually unchallenged, while members of the medical profession mutilate born children’s bodies with impunity.

I say this with sorrow, but it’s hard for me to believe that abortion could become “unthinkable” any time soon.

—Anne Conlon is managing editor of the Human Life Review.

 

Christopher Bell

Can God forgive me?

About a dozen years post-Roe v. Wade, a woman with a child came to live in a maternity home and unknowingly revealed a profound truth.

“This isn’t the first time I became pregnant,” she confessed in hushed tones to the only other person within earshot. “The first time my mom said, ‘We have to take care of this problem.’”

She described in painful detail the lies and deception Planned Parenthood engaged in to take the child from her womb, leaving her screaming and crying. Then she asked two questions, which at that time her listener had never considered.

“When people see me with my son now and ask if he is my first, what do I tell them?”

Then came the question many post-abortive women have come to grieve, “Where do you think my first baby is?”

In the pit of my stomach, I realized then how abortion hurts women. I had not seen that before.

In the mid-80s no one was saying how abortion hurts women. Not much is said about it even today, certainly not by media oracles or high priests of culture and the courts.  Even among those vast numbers of Americans who know women who’ve had an abortion, the cries at night over the loss of those children are silently hidden.

Now, as back then, psychologists, social workers, even medical doctors hear these sorrowful sagas, but they are not listening. Loud public drumbeats insisting “It’s a choice!” . . . “It’s the most common operation in the country!” . . . draw their attention away.

Sonograms help change lots of hearts and minds. Think of Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who helped lead the fight to make abortion legal but later became a committed prolifer. And more recently Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood director who, like Nathanson, changed her mind because of a sonogram image. Think of thousands of pregnant women who’ve visited pregnancy help centers or mobile units and opted to keep the child they saw cavorting on the screen.

Yet, people see and don’t perceive and hear but don’t understand (Matthew 13:13 and Mark 4:12).

Maybe there was a time when you didn’t see or were not convinced. Maybe you’ve had your own epiphany or you know those who have had one. It will take that kind of conversion on a titanic scale.

Two periods in history come to mind when killing the innocent was also encouraged and protected by the authorities: the ancient Roman and later Aztec empires. Both had a highly developed ruling class and sophisticated pagan religious beliefs. Their peoples supported and largely by choice participated in the sacrificing even of their very own.

The Romans practiced birth control and abortion on a large enough scale to actually fall into depopulation, making it easier for the barbarians to overrun their once mighty empire.

The Aztecs mostly sacrificed their enemies. Yet they also considered it an honor to be among the people “offered” to their gods.

When Cortez was conquering Mexico City, even as the Aztec warriors knew they were going to lose, the human sacrifices continued until the final hour of defeat.

What stopped Roman and Aztec killing of the innocent?  Conversion.

The Romans became Christians over time. Our Lady of Guadalupe ended Aztec human sacrifice in a flash. It will take each one of us who believe in the sanctity of human life to bring about culture-wide conversion—through prayer, penance, increasing our own families by birth and adoption, and increasing the Christian family through evangelization.

With the mothers and fathers who have participated in abortion, we need to share the Good News of forgiveness, healing, and hope which comes from the sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

We need to raise up our children, those we birth and those we adopt, in the knowledge that true love is life giving. That it means sacrificing one’s self for others. And extending forgiveness so as to promote healing and spiritual rejuvenation.

We are called to show this healing, sacrificial love to our enemies.

When the abortionist, or one of his patients, asks, “Where are those babies?” Our ready answer needs to be: “They are waiting and begging for you to ask for forgiveness.”

Forgiveness is what we all need to give—and receive.

Can God forgive me, who has the grace of knowing the truth, for not doing enough, for not being the Good Samaritan, stopping along the way to bind the wounds of those who are dying, especially those who are spiritually dying as they promote and perform abortions?

—Christopher Bell is the founder and president of Good Counsel, homes for pregnant and parenting mothers and babies before and after birth. He and his wife Joan Andrews Bell are blessed with seven children by birth and adoption, and one grandchild.

 

 

Anne Hendershott

On May 16, 2002, in the middle of an episode in the eighth season of the NBC television show Friends, an extraordinary commercial appeared. Strategically placed during the broadcast of the most-anticipated episode of the season, when the main character on the show was scheduled to give birth, the commercial introduced General Electric’s 4-D Ultrasound imaging system, a remarkable new development in prenatal ultrasound technology. Its sponsors correctly predicting a large audience of young female viewers, the commercial opened with the haunting refrain from Roberta Flack’s classic song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” as the camera seductively drew the viewer’s attention to a computer in a hospital room with a glowing ultrasound image of a perfectly formed unborn child on the screen. The camera then pulled back to reveal a mother and father gazing longingly at their unborn baby as he sucked his thumb, kicked his legs, and appeared to float in an almost magical world.

It may have appeared magical but the world of the unborn child is very real—one that cannot be denied. Yet after the commercial aired, American Prospect Online writer Matthew Nisbet, in an article entitled “They Bring Good Spin to Life,” labeled it “propaganda.” Claiming that the commercial “blurred the distinction” between a fetus and a newborn infant, Nisbet reassured readers that they did not see what they knew they had seen.

But, of course, this “blurring” is the heart of the matter, having been at the core of the pro-life position for decades. We know there is no substantial difference between the unborn child and the newborn infant. We have always known that. What’s changed is, now, it is simply not possible to deny what we all saw in that commercial, and what everyone sees in ultrasounds of their own children and grandchildren, and in those shared by friends and family members.

Perhaps earlier generations—those without access to ultrasound technology—were able to deny the humanity of the unborn child. Seventeen years ago, some may have been convinced by arguments that the GE ultrasound image was not “real.” No longer. Rational people know that a fetus is “unique life” and not a clump of cells. A January 2019 Marist poll found that 75% of Americans say abortion should be limited to the first three months of pregnancy. Support for restricting abortion to the first trimester came from both Republicans (92%) and Democrats (60%); even 61% of those who identify as pro-choice want these same restrictions on abortion. Beyond first-trimester restrictions, a significant majority of all Americans oppose any taxpayer funding of abortion (54% to 39%), 62% of all Americans oppose abortion in cases of Down syndrome, and 59% would ban abortion after 20 weeks except to save the life of the mother.

Perhaps in the past, CNN contributor and former New York City politician Christine Quinn could have gotten away with telling Chris Cuomo on CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time last month that the child in the womb is “not a human being.” No longer. A recent Harris-Hill poll reveals that more than half of all registered voters believe that laws banning abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy are not too restrictive. Millennials are even more likely to support abortion restrictions. A recent Students for Life poll revealed that 70 percent of millennials support limits on abortion.

It should not surprise anyone that millennials view abortion negatively. They have seen the reality—the proof that the unborn child is a human being. Some of them have seen their own ultrasound photos, as well as those of their children. Yet, the Washington Post published an article lamenting the lack of support for abortion rights among this group with the headline: “Millennials have a surprising view on later-term abortions.”

Millennial writers are not staying silent. When the New York Times recently published an op-ed by an abortion provider titled “Abortion Saves Lives,” Alexandra DeSanctis, a 2016 University of Notre Dame graduate, responded the next day in a column on National Review Online, calling the Times piece an “Orwellian effort to redefine the terms of the abortion debate and obscure the reality of what takes place in abortion procedures.” Millennials like DeSanctis are courageously confronting those who used to have the power to shape the dialogue—they are forcing everyone to confront the reality of what happens in an abortion.

Writing about the danger of the denial of reality, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leader of the resistance movement against Hitler’s genocidal Nazi Socialist Party, wrote that “the denial of reality lives upon hatred of the real and of the world which is created and loved by God . . . Satan’s truth is the denial of reality.” We all know that every abortion ends a child’s life—and that is a reality that is becoming harder than ever to deny.

—Anne Hendershott is a professor of sociology at Steubenville University, Ohio, and director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life.

 

 

Chuck Donovan

Every abortion is an act of violence against a fellow human being. Many abortions are also, in a medically rich society, acts of discrimination—against the mother.

By act of discrimination, I do not mean those cases, now percolating, to use Justice Clarence Thomas’s vivid phrase, in the lower federal courts and involving eugenic forms of abortion. In those cases, several states have acted to ban abortion of once-“wanted” children who become vulnerable based on their sex, race, or the detection of a disability. Winning one of those cases in the relatively near term offers one of the likelier scenarios for a Supreme Court ruling that pulls us back from the brutality of Roe v. Wade.

No, the discrimination that can mark abortion as the grossest of inequalities has a more basic character. It can be seen in the magnificence and the monstrosity of events that occurred exactly 1.0 miles apart—at 3801 Lancaster Avenue and 3401 Civic Center Boulevard in Philadelphia.

One place is notorious, the other celebrated. On Lancaster Avenue, Dr. Kermit Gosnell plied his grisly trade for 30 years, with the complicity of public and private officials, Republicans and Democrats alike, turning unborn children into so much carrion, taking the lives of two women, and injuring many more. On Civic Center Boulevard, 21 cents’ worth of gasoline away from Gosnell’s house of horrors, medical miracles happen every day at the fetal care hospital where C. Everett Koop, M.D., led a 14-member team that successfully separated conjoined twins in 1957.

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, or CHOP, is one of a growing number of U.S. children’s hospitals to have a separate fetal surgery unit. It has successfully operated on more than 1,764 children—treated in the womb, thriving today. Every June, CHOP hosts what it calls the “fetal family reunion.” This year’s 23rd annual reunion was held on June 2, and once again a panoramic photograph appears on the CHOP website, showing the hospital courtyard teeming with exultant children and families.

Gosnell’s red brick mausoleum is closed and, thankfully, shuttered—but not because of the conscience of the nation, to quote the title of President Reagan’s landmark essay, but because of one persistent detective and a drug enforcement raid that stumbled on what, precisely, an abortion clinic is for: death on a massive scale.

And the discrimination? Look at the descriptions from the trial of what the impoverished women who turned blue or bled in Gosnell’s clinic received from our society. Compare them to what the CHOP website proclaims its splendid care can deliver to women whose babies are wanted and whose financial arrangements are good.

Gosnell: a “stained and tattered examination table.”

CHOP: “The world’s first birthing unit dedicated to healthy mothers of babies with known birth defects.”

Gosnell: An ultrasound machine “yellowed in parts” with “wires darkly colored” and a once cream-colored keyboard now dark brown.

CHOP: “experienced sonographers and imaging technicians, [with] each scan . . .  reviewed by a highly specialized attending radiologist.”

Gosnell: a 15-year-old “anesthesiologist.”

CHOP: “internationally-recognized experts in fetal therapy and maternal-fetal medicine.”

These are not just the common inequities in a country in which some dine at Tavern on the Green while others linger outside food pantries. The concentration of abortion among minorities and the poor is a gulf that should drive our nation to the kind of shame it claims to feel when some partisan advantage is at stake—but that fades with the next political counterpunch thrown on Fox or CNN.

Now, as Charlotte Lozier Institute data show, the abortion industry is turning to the promotion of chemical abortion without medical presence. The home and the dormitory room are to be the new clinics, and the mode of abortion is to be isolation. The depiction of chemical abortion in the film Unplanned and the personal testimonies reported in the Life Issues Institute documentary show the harrowing reality.

As 2019 marches on, our cause has more work to do than ever. The pro-life movement has built thousands of pregnancy help centers. Volunteered millions of hours, wept, worked, and prayed for a better day. Now, with our Supreme Court apparently open to changes in law, it must be asked, “Do we have love enough for what lies ahead?” On the eve of a potential new day in this fight, are we ready to be First Responders for Life, no matter the cost in time and treasure?

—Chuck Donovan is president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute.

 

Kathryn Jean Lopez

The abortion issue is not settled because our hearts are not settled. Thanks be to God, in a way. If when you look around at our politics and culture, you have an aching feeling that nothing is quite right, that’s a good sign. Good, because it suggests there’s hope yet for an awakening of the conscience of America.

And thanks be to God for Malcolm Muggeridge. Rereading him now is not only a reminder of what a great journalist he was, but also of how much the world needs converts. The passion converts like Muggeridge bring with them on their continuing journey—in his case, a decades-long pilgrimage from atheism to the Catholic Church—is renewing.

Even just half-listening to some of the extremism now being voiced in politics—increasingly without euphemism—and witnessing some of the protests and counter protests that pop up—even outside Masses—one senses the underlying evil and pain that permeate America’s abortion infrastructure. Settling this contentious issue is going to involve drawing women and men away from those places that offer the darkest “solution” to the problem of unwanted pregnancy.

Now more than ever, the pro-life movement needs to be the most welcoming place in the world. People must be invited to get to know the pregnancy-care center down the block, to see the love that goes into these efforts to help women have their children, not destroy them. People need to see anew that this isn’t about a single-issue vote or, especially in the elongated campaign season we have entered, about a presidential election or candidate.

Yes, it’s entangling and suffocating, this embedded culture of abortion. The nature of some news stories—and Planned Parenthood tweeting—on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can make it seem as if a culture of life and a civilization of love are naïve and impossible dreams. But when we show people we love one another, when we recognize their human dignity and treat everyone—even abortion advocates—with respect, we make a real difference in the culture. It’s a more powerful witness than politics, and could have an even more enduring effect than gaining a Supreme Court majority, as important as that is to achieving our goal of seeing unborn children once again protected in law.

The poll numbers, and the real human stories one hears of women looking for signs of hope and help as they make their way to the door of an abortion clinic, show us that people desire a better way to live—abortion isn’t it. Making life plausible and possible and, yes, making abortion “unthinkable,” this is the better way. Most of those who describe themselves as pro-choice simply want to know that a woman in a difficult situation has options. What are we doing today to help make options other than abortion available to her? That’s a question for every reader of the Human Life Review, for sure. A question for anyone who wants to see this issue stop being driven by politics every election cycle, often marked by stinging rhetoric that has the effect of pouring salt into open wounds. And it’s an action item that can turn conversations about abortion away from the heat of battle and into the heart of homes, where loving and engaged family life can transform so much that is broken in our country.

Nothing is settled. That reality is both unsettling and encouraging. There is much work yet to be done. But with fiercely dedicated and tender care, there will be more conversions. There will be more heroic women, bolstered by communities of love around them, choosing childbirth and hope over abortion and despair. Our job is to continue to speak truth and show mercy, and to celebrate and support all heralds of life in a culture that often seems to be doubling down on death.

—Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and editor-at-large of National Review.