Editor’s note: This text initially appeared within the April 1, 1989, issue of America as “Abortion: The Axe on the Root of Human Rights.”
Thomas Jefferson revealed a profound insight when he said, “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty.” He clearly saw the unbreakable link between the sacredness of life and human freedom. Our Founding Fathers firmly believed and enshrined within the Declaration of Independence the conviction that the precise to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness doesn’t derive from laws or from governments. They bequeathed to this nation as its very foundation stone the conviction that the precise to life and to liberty are transcendent rights inherent within the human person by reason of creation. They will not be a grant from the state. They weren’t given to the people of the USA by King George III or by George Washington. Nor are those rights given to us by any President, Congress or Supreme Court. They’re simply a part of what it means to be human. Consequently they’re immune from violation by the federal government, and it’s the chief responsibility of the federal government to guard and insure the inviolability of those rights.
With the complicity of powerful segments of drugs and law, massive numbers of abortions have bred an increasing insensitivity to the sacredness of life.
But a really dangerous thing is going on in our country, and the time has come for considering people to open their eyes. There are actually greater than one million legal abortions in our country every 12 months. With a view to make this possible, powerful segments of two of the noblest human professions, medicine and law, have abdicated their integrity and embraced fictions that allow them to support abortion. Medicine, though it knows higher, has agreed to abjure its service of life and destroy what it clearly knows is unborn human life within the mother’s womb. That the life within the mother’s womb is human life is clearly demonstrated by the undeniable fact that in 1974 a national commission was created for the protection of human subjects of biomedical and behavioral research. The commission was to report back to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Objections were raised against experimenting on the unborn child within the womb. Those that favored these experiments identified: “Regardless of the large database that exists regarding fetal well-being within the sheep and other laboratory animals, little of that is directly applicable to the human situation. Anatomical peculiarities and physiologic differences have meant that these models don’t provide sufficient data to reply these questions in a human situation…No animal species has proven ideal as a model for human amniocentesis studies.” It is apparent, then, that the scientists desired to do research on unborn human infants precisely because they’re human and never animal.
Similarly, large segments of the legal occupation, who should know higher, have permitted themselves to be instrumentalized into creating, as a justification for abortion, a “right to privacy” that doesn’t exist within the Structure of the USA and that, even when it did, couldn’t rationally or logically be interpreted as a reason to destroy innocent, unborn human life.
A mix of fiction and fantasy, this pervasive abortion psychology, which has so profoundly enchanted and held captive two of the best human professions, has inflicted a really deep wound on the American conscience.
With the complicity of those powerful segments of drugs and law, massive numbers of abortions have bred an increasing insensitivity to the sacredness of life. There seems to exist a pathological incapacity to grasp the plain truth that if human life isn’t inviolable within the mother’s womb, if law and medicine can authorize the killing of the unborn child, there is no such thing as a true logic that may forbid law or medicine or the state from destroying life at every other point in its development. Even capricious reasons comparable to the parent’s desire to have a baby of a sex different from that of the kid within the womb are actually getting used for abortion. Now that such a consciousness is pervasive and deeply ingrained within the population, who will prevent its spread to the handicapped, the elderly, those some may consider inferior? The state is already intruding increasingly arrogantly into the sphere of the rightful authority of fogeys. As an illustration, a teen-age girl who will need to have parental consent to have her ears pierced doesn’t require parental consent to destroy the unborn child in her womb. Yet there appears to be a growing acceptance of all these items and too little appreciation of their inner logic.
There are connections and dynamics that individuals must awaken to. Several years ago I used to be asked to talk on the pastoral letter of the U.S. Catholic bishops on economic justice on the national convention of a Jewish organization. Throughout the discussion period that followed, a gentleman rose to make the commentary: “No Jew can ever afford to be indifferent to poverty since it was poverty that permitted the rise of Hitler.” Similarly, no considering American could be indifferent to abortion. Because if life at one point is not any longer inviolable, why is it inviolable at every other point in its development? If human life within the mother’s womb could be destroyed, what logic can prevent the destruction of the lifetime of incurables in mental institutions, of the chronically sick, of the “unproductive” elderly and of others who could also be considered a “burden” on society? The appropriate to life is the elemental right. When the precise to life isn’t sovereign but could be violated for any reason in any respect, then all other rights are also in jeopardy. Abortion is the axe at the foundation of the tree of human rights.
When the precise to life isn’t sovereign but could be violated for any reason in any respect, then all other rights are also in jeopardy. Abortion is the axe at the foundation of the tree of human rights.
Practical, even plausible reasons, because it was thought, underlay the well-known medical experimentation of the Nazi regime: the advancement of science, the development of the German race. But immoral and irresponsible experimentation contrary to the rights of the person opened the door to the grim policy of extermination marked by euphemisms about social good and the great of the nation. Once medicine allowed itself to be instrumentalized for purposes in conflict with its occupation, it lost its soul; and the advancement of science, as an alternative of being a road to human enrichment, became a Molech of destruction, justified by those that engaged in it. Because the Nuremberg trials revealed, those on trial saw nothing unsuitable in what they did.
And so one of the frightening things about abortion in the USA is that society has grow to be used to it and sees nothing unsuitable in it.
Something has happened to the soul of a nation when the destruction of unborn human life becomes a method of insuring privacy. What has happened to the soul of our country when those that are for all times and seek to defend it and who call law and medicine to the ideals of their occupation are called fanatics, while those that abjure the ideals of their occupation and who promote the destruction of life are said to be enlightened, practical people of common sense?
If the soul of a nation is to be great, it will need to have great moral horizons. It will probably never allow its judgments touching the inviolability of life to grow to be the pawn of expediency or allow itself to subordinate the precise to life to every other consideration.
A classy radar and satellite reconnaissance system gives our military a seamless and meticulous grasp of even the smallest thing that could possibly be dangerous to our country’s well-being. Nothing is just too small to be noted and reviewed because our freedom and security are too overwhelmingly essential. If we’re to survive in the complete enjoyment of human rights, we desperately need an inner reconnaissance system in the center and soul of our nation that may alert us to the profound danger for human rights that lurks in abortion. Regardless of what other considerations could also be raised—the issue of unwanted children, the issues of ineptly performed abortions, the issues of girls who can have been victimized— the actual fact stays and have to be understood that abortion is the destruction of unborn human life. That’s the true and most fundamental problem and constitutes probably the most pernicious danger to the entire edifice of human rights.
