News flash, April 2, 2008: Florida House passes H.B 257 mandating pre-abortion ultrasound tests. Good news for Florida where health department statistics record almost 100,000 abortions annually.
It has been a long fight since Roe v. Wade.
As a freshman law student in 1973-74, I was introduced to Roe v. Wade through a paperback supplement to my hardbound constitutional law hornbook. I vaguely remember my professor suggesting that the subject was so profound that it justified this special supplement. Treating the case as just another in the deluge of cases we briefed for con-law, many of us never paused to consider the deeper societal implications of Roe v. Wade. I wish my professor had cried out, “Wake up, a liberal Supreme Court has just embraced the social experiment of abortion-on-demand.”
So, what if he had? It was all high philosophy at that point. The pro-abortion advocates now had their mandate to lead America into an age of reason, full of adult happiness free of unwanted pregnancy. Yet, what the pro-choice advocates delivered was a holocaust like no other before it, with residual adult grief crippling unknown numbers of American women.
What have we learned? To paraphrase Stalin, we’ve learned that a single death is a tragedy but a million deaths is merely a statistic.
Of course, there has been progress in the state houses and in Congress with laws requiring parental notification and banning partial-birth abortion. But this civil rights issue will not be solved by government mandates.
On the tenth anniversary of Roe v. Wade the Great Communicator framed the issue for us in his article for The Human Life Review entitled “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation.”
In Reagan’s words: Continued... |