1. The removal of the rule forbidding most health care workers from discussing abortion with a pregnant woman.
2. The permission of the use of fetal tissue in federally financed medical research.
3. The allowing of US military personnel and their dependents overseas to receive abortions in military hospitals at their own expense.
4. The reversal of the policy to refuse to aid international programs promoting population control.
5. The reconsideration of the ban on the importation of RU 486, the French made "morning-after-pill."
   
   

The tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade is a good time for us to pause and reflect. Our nation-wide policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy was neither voted for by our people nor enacted by our legislators--not a single state had such unrestricted abortion before the Supreme Court decreed it to be national policy in 1973. But the consequences of this judicial decision are now obvious: since 1973, more than 15 million unborn children have had their lives snuffed out by legalized abortions. This is over ten times the number of Americans lost in all our nations's wars. . . .

As an act of "raw judicial power" (to use Justice White's biting phrase), the decision by the seven-man majority in Roe v. Wade has so far been made to stick. But the Court's decision has by no means settled the debate. Instead, Roe v. Wade has become a continuing prod to the conscience of the nation.

Abortion concerns not just the unborn child, it concerns every one of us. The English poet, John Donne, wrote: "... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." (Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, pp. 15-18.)

Randall Terry (spokesman for the pro-life organization Operation Rescue): The bottom line is that killing children is not what America is all about. We are not here to destroy our offspring.

Faye Wattleton (president of Planned Parenthood): Well, we are also not here to have the government use women's bodies as the instrument of the state, to force women into involuntary servitude--

Randall Terry (laughing): Oh come on, Faye.

Faye Wattleton:--I think that as Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, our independence, and when we reflect on our personal liberties, this is a very, very somber time, in which the courts have said that the most private aspects of our lives are now . . . not protected by the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. and I believe that that is a time for Americans to reflect on the need to return to the fundamentals, and the fundamentals of personal privacy are really the cornerstones upon which our democracy is built.

Randall Terry: I think that to assume or even suggest that the founding fathers of this country risked their lives and many of them died so that we can kill our offspring is pathetic.

Although Randall Terry and Faye Wattleton were debating the morality and legality of abortion, what they said goes far beyond the abortion controversy. . . .the culture war emerges over fundamentally different conceptions of moral authority, over different ideas and beliefs about truth, the good, obligation to one another, the nature of community, and so on. It is, therefore, cultural conflict at its deepest level. . . .the contemporary culture war is ultimately a struggle over national identity--over the meaning of America, who we have been in the past, who we are now, and perhaps most important, who we, as a nation, will aspire to become in the new millennium. (pp. 49-50.)

That report observed that the Committee had been appointed to investigate criminal abortion "with a view to its general suppression." It deplored abortion and its frequency and it listed three causes of "this general demoralization":

"The first of these causes is a wide-spread popular ignorance of the true character of the crime--a belief, even among mothers themselves, that the foetus is not alive till after the period of quickening.
"The second of the agents alluded to is the fact that the profession themselves are frequently supposed careless of foetal life . . . .
"The third reason of the frightful extent of this crime is found in the grave defects of our laws both common and statute, as regards the independent and actual existence of the child before birth, as a living being. These errors, which are sufficient in most instances to prevent conviction, are based, and only based, upon mistaken and exploded medical dogmas. With strange inconsistency, the law fully acknowledges the foetus in utero and its inherent rights, for civil purposes; while personally and as criminally affected, it fails to recognize it, and to its life as yet denies all protection." (410 US, pp. 141-42.)

I am concerned about legislation that would take the problems of life and death out of the hands of the medical profession, and out of the realm of trust between the doctor and his patient or the patient's family, and put them into the legal realm.
Perhaps more than the law, I fear the attitude of our profession in sanctioning infanticide and in moving inexorably down the road from abortion to infanticide, to the destruction of a child who is socially embarrassing, to you-name-it.
I am concerned that there is no outcry. I can well understand that there are people who are led to starve children to death because they think that they are doing something right for society or are following a principle of Hegel that is utilitarian for society. But I cannot understand why the other people, and I know that there are many, don't cry out. I am concerned about this because when the first 273,000 German aged, infirm, and retarded were killed in gas chambers there was no outcry from that medical profession either, and it was not far from there to Auschwitz. (Afterword in Ronald Reagan, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, pp. 69-70.)

Regardless of whether or not the fetus is viewed as a person to be protected by the Constitution, the fetus is definitely not marmalade, rubbish, a gobbet of meat, or part of the woman's body. That the fetus is part of his mother's body has no physiological justification. He has his own unique genetic code, a combination of his mother's and father's genes. He has a separate nervous system and circulation system and his own skeleton, musculature, brain, heart, and other vital organs. The fact that the fetus is not part of the woman's body undermines the feminists' argument; the right to control one's own body does not justify abortion because the fetus is not part of the woman's body. The fetus is deliberately misrepresented in order to justify his extermination.

The "unborn child as patient" has been an emerging medical reality during recent years with the development of various forms of intrauterine surgery. Young Paul Bennett, born in January of 1982, was diagnosed as being hydrocephalic when he was still inside his mother's womb, then five months pregnant. Surgeons at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center performed a delicate intrauterine operation that saved Paul from a life of severe retardation by placing a tiny shunt in his skull while he was still in the womb. Such operations demonstrate dramatically that when physicians deal with a pregnant woman, two patients rather than one are involved. The simultaneity of heroic efforts to repair birth defects of some unborn children and the abortion of other children with similar defects, sometimes in the same hospital, points to the deep moral and legal schizophrenia surrounding abortion in the United States today.

After the fluid was withdrawn, he injected 200 cc's of the saline solution--half a pint of concentrated salt solution. From then on, it was terrible. My baby began thrashing about--it was like a regular boxing match in there. She was in pain. The saline was burning her skin, her eyes, her throat. It was choking her, making her sick. She was in agony, trying to escape. She was scared and confused at how her wonderful little home had suddenly been turned into a death trap.
For some reason it had never entered my mind that with an abortion she would have to die. I had never wanted my baby to die; I only wanted to get rid of my "problem." But it was too late to turn back now. There was no way to save her. So instead I talked to her. I tried to comfort her. I tried to ease her pain. I told her I didn't want to do this to her, but it was too late to stop it. I didn't want her to die. I begged her not to die. I told her I was sorry, to forgive me, that I was wrong, that I didn't want to kill her.
For two hours I could feel her struggling inside me. But then, as suddenly as it began, she stopped. Even today, I remember her very last kick on my left side. She had no strength left, She gave up and died. Despite my grief and guilt, I was relieved that her pain was finally over. But I was never the same again. The abortion killed not only my daughter; it killed a part of me.

Had England's William Wilberforce despaired of his lone voice against slavery as a member of the House of Commons, the moral power of his argument would not have been heard and the abolition movement in England and later in America might never have begun.

Had Susan B. Anthony caved into the "political realities" of male power, women might never have won the right to vote.

Had the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. concluded in the Birmingham jail that segregation was too powerful a force to be overcome, the civil rights movement might have been delayed or denied. One searches in vain for statues to greatness that stand on foundations of resignation to political realities. Those we revere stood for principled truth, often against great odds. Those we revile, if we remember them at all, compromised or gave up when the going got tough. . . .

The debate is not over. If it takes a decade, or a century, or more, prolifers have only begun to fight for the weakest of the human family. Like the British in their darkest hour, prolifers say with Winston Churchill that we will never give up. Never, never, never.

Despite the formidable obstacles before us, we must not lose heart. This is not the first time our country has been divided by a Supreme Court decision that denied the value of certain human lives. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 was not overturned in a day, or a year, or even a decade. At first only a minority of Americans recognized and deplored the moral crisis brought about by denying the full humanity of our black brothers and sisters; but that minority persisted in their vision and finally prevailed. They did it by appealing to the hearts and minds of their countrymen, to the truth of human dignity under God. From their example, we know that respect for the sacred value of human life is too deeply ingrained in the hearts of our people to remain forever suppressed. (Reagan, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, p. 19.)