OPINION: A New Abolitionism, It is Time to End Abortion

An entire class of little persons, children in the womb, have been relegated to the status of personal property who can be disposed of by those more powerful than they. It is time for a new abolitionism. It is time to end abortion.

CHESAPEAKE, VA (Catholic Online) - Two years ago I was driving home, "dog tired" as they say. My day had begun before the crack of dawn.

I left to beat the horrid "Beltway Traffic" in Washington D.C. before 4 AM in the morning. I was completing my coursework at Catholic University and driving these long hours was a part of the drill.

The morning class was followed by an important luncheon meeting.I had at least two hours left to drive before I would arrive home.

When I began my academic work, my oldest daughter, knowing how long the drives would be, bought me an "XM" radio. It helped in moments of fatigue such as the one I found myself in on that day.

So, I turned on Fox News thinking it would help to fill the time and keep me awake for the long drive. It did much more - it filled me-with indignation!

The Fox "all star" panel was having a discussion moderated by Brit Hume. The topic was the action of the South Dakota legislature in passing State legislation banning most abortions and the courageous action of Governor Mike Rounds in signing it.

During the panel discussion, the loaded language of the "abortion debate" was flying. However, it was one phrase that prompted the writing of this article and my decision to begin using a new term.

South Dakota is a State which, when the history of the great human rights struggle of our age, the Pro-life Movement, is written, will be remembered as one of its great leaders. Just this past June, 2008, a Federal appeals court ruled that South Dakota can finally begin to enforce a State law which requires Doctors to tell women seeking an abortion the truth, that every abortion ends a human life.

In a 7-4 decision, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals removed the last obstacle to telling these women the truth.

The law, passed by the voters in 2005 law requires Doctors to inform their patients seeking to end the life of the child in their womb "that the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being."

They also have to tell the woman that they have a right to continue to carry the child and that an abortion may cause them psychological harm.

This truthful disclosure was opposed by Planned Parenthood. They obviously had a vested financial interest in the matter given the multiple millions they "earn" annually through their participation in the continued shedding of the blood of the unborn.

They maintained that the disclosure was ideological. The Court disagreed saying it was biological and medical.

Harold Cassidy is one of the thousands of pro-life lawyers who history will also record as having given of themselves in a sacrificial manner to defend children in the womb and help their mothers to hear the truth.

He expressed my own sentiments exactly when he told the Press his thoughts on the recent decision:"We think it's a big victory for the woman obviously to be given accurate information in order to make a decision not only for the child, but also for herself," Cassidy said.

However, the response from the purveyors of death on demand has been unparalleled to South Dakotas law. Its ferocity has been bolstered by the horrid rhetoric which has surrounded the debate over the so called "right" to do what is against the Natural Law", take the lives of innocent children in the first home of the whole human race, their mothers womb.

The Rhetoric of Ruin

It was Juan Williams, one of the panelists, who sent my blood pressure upward as I listened to the debate between these "Fox All Stars" on that day several years ago.

He repeatedly referred to the Legislators, and the people who overwhelmingly supported their action in South Dakota, as "anti-abortion rights" activists.

I have written for years concerning the verbal engineering that usually precedes legislative, judicial and cultural engineering. C.S. Lewis, in his marvelous "Essay on Words" aptly referred to such a misuse of rhetoric as "verbicide" -the intentional murder of a word.

That is what this horrid expression, "anti-abortion rights activists" truly is!

We have witnessed this use of words as weapons of destruction in other times in our history when darkness has momentarily squeezed the light of truth from public discourse.

It was not that long ago when the insidious rise of National Socialism in Germany was prepared by just such verbal engineering. It was the use of loaded language such as the evil phraseology of death contained in the book entitled "Life Unworthy of Life", written by that centuries lawyer/doctor duo of death, Hoche and Binding which led the evil way.

In that evil little book, the German Doctor and lawyer, Hoche and Binding, coined the phrase "useless eaters" in referring to the disabled and those whom the emerging Nazi movement wanted to eliminate.

In so doing, they laid the verbal predicate in language for the construction of gas ovens in which the unthinkable, the killing of human persons, later occurred.

This act of pure evil was then referred to as a "final solution" in one of the most insidious examples of verbicide. This evil was then protected by civil law in Nazi Germany!

We look with horror on that chapter in history. We ask ourselves how such evil could occur? Yet, we fail to recognize what we are doing to another class of persons in our own age!

We witnessed another example of the powerful abuse of loaded language in a sad chapter in our own American history - when slavery was "legal", even called a "right" and protected by the United States Supreme Court. The lingering effects of this social evil still cry out for remedy!

Human Persons whose skin pigmentation was darker than those who then held the reigns of power were treated as property and allowed to be "legally owned" and used by others - all with the approval of a Supreme Court which had sacrificed Natural Law and Justice.

A very similar jurisprudence is found in Roe v Wade and its progeny; an entire class of persons, children in the womb, have been relegated to the status of "chattel", personal property, who can be disposed of by those more powerful than they.

They have no voice that can be heard except our own.

These human children, our first neighbors in the first home of the whole human race, their mothers' womb, are being killed by chemicals and surgical strikes - all of which is currently protected by the power of a State.

They have no power to resist this new form of slavery without our help. They are subject to use, abuse and destruction by those with more power. Medical science has simply confirmed what our conscience already knows; the child in the womb is our neighbor.

Over the last two years news accounts out of India have confirmed the practice of prenatal selection and selective abortions being performed on girl children. This practice involves the use of ultrasounds to locate these girls in the first home of the womb and then guide their selective killing through various abortion procedures.

These same procedures are being used in the United States. Universally, this practice has been decried. It is routinely referred to as "Feticide" in the news reports.

I have now decided to use that same term from now on when discussing all procured abortion. It is "feticide" and it is evil. It is time to end abortion.

In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down abortion bans across the country. In so doing, they "legalized" the killing of the unborn in all 50 states throughout all nine months of pregnancy, at least in the positive law. Fifty million lives have been taken since then in procured abortions.

The Court "created" a new "right", somehow discovering it in a "penumbra" around the so called "right to privacy" in the U.S. Constitution. Even many of the legal scholars who support legal abortion now acknowledge that the legal opinion is a disaster. It was poorly reasoned, based on junk medical science, inaccurate history and is on a collision course with itself.

Each time Juan Williams used the phrase "anti-abortion rights", I cringed in my car seat. I asked him aloud in my car the following question:

"Juan, if you had been alive during the last round of slavery, would you have referred to those who rightly opposed it, even though it was called a "right" and protected by the then Supreme Court, "anti-slavery rights activists"?

Perhaps he will yet read this article. An articulate man with so much to offer, he has sadly succumbed to the verbal engineers of our age.This rhetoric of ruin must be exposed, opposed and replaced!

The New Language of life

It is time for those who are on the side of truth and justice - that is those who recognize what medical science and natural justice both tell us that children in the womb are human persons with an inalienable right to life - to begin using a new language in our current human rights struggle. Without the right to life there are no other rights.

Without the freedom to be born, there are no other freedoms.

Along with the important understanding that every "use" of persons as property, in or outside of the womb, promotes a culture of death and is therefore unjust, we must apply a hierarchy of values in our struggle for all human rights.

The killing of innocent human persons in the womb - and its continued protection by the Police Power of the State -calls for a primacy in our social justice efforts - fifty plus million lives have been taken since Roe. Abortion must end.

I am pro-life, pro-family, pro-freedom, pro-poor and pro-peace. I am committed to a consistent ethic of life from the womb to the tomb. However, the killing of innocent children in the womb is the pre-eminent moral evil of our age and the time is ripe for a new abolitionism.

Procured abortions are Feticide. Not only have I decided to call every procured abortion "Feticide" (which it is, simply look up the definition of feticide) I have begun to use other language that I hope will help in the most important moral and human rights issue of our age, protecting our "first neighbors".

For example, I regularly call children in the womb our "first neighbors"! We should not kill our neighbors. The womb is the "first home" of the whole human race and standing up for them is a matter of solidarity with our neighbor and love for the poor.We should not stand by while they are evicted and killed!

Every single person alive today once lived in a womb! For Christians, this inescapable fact is made even more profound when we remember that our Redeemer lived in a womb!

Thus, His stirring words, recorded in the twenty fifth chapter of Matthews' Gospel, have an exceedingly poignant application in relationship to our sisters and brothers in the womb: "Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me."

Our call is to replace the current culture of death, nihilism, and instrumentalism with a new culture of life and a civilization of love.

Our "strategy" must be to end abortion.

Asymetrical Activism

South Dakota is only the first State to pass such legislation. many must follow. The legislation was well drafted and supported by a record of legislative findings of fact that includes unassailable medical science which unequivocally affirms that children in the womb are, in fact, human beings and therefore persons.

The legislation had and still has overwhelming popular support. That is why it survived efforts by "pro-choice" (read "pro-feticide") extremists to defeat it through a referendum.

Several other States are now said to be ready to follow this example.

Some within the pro-life community have speculated that such a courageous act by a State legislature is ill conceived. I have heard the arguments that the incremental approach stands a "better chance" and that somehow the South Dakota approach will harm the inevitable incremental curtailing of abortions.

I say nonsense!

Human Rights activism always requires an asymmetrical approach. The choice is not "either/or", it is always "both/and".

I have long supported incremental efforts geared toward the limitations and curtailment of abortion. I was a practicing pro-life lawyer for a very long time. For seven years in the last decade I led the American Center for Law and Justice which used such incrementalism in securing the protection of pro-life speech.

However, pitting these complimentary strategies against one another is wrong. It also fails to comprehend the gravity of the moral evil that is legal abortion.

That is why I have now chosen to use a new term to characterize my own opposition to legal abortion. It is time for a new abolitionism. It is time to end abortion!

Conclusion: The New Abolitionism

Listening to Juan Williams that day several years ago prompted me to take this verbal action.I will not be called an "anti- abortion rights" activist. You simply cannot have a "right" to do what is always wrong, that is to take innocent human life!

South Dakota has secured a place in American history as the first "Free State" for little persons.

At another critical time in our Nations history another evil was once "sanctioned" by the Supreme Court, the "owning" of human beings as property. The Supreme Court was wrong then and the Supreme Court is wrong now.

For a while in that last human rights struggle, some States were "Free States" and some were "Slave States."
After Roe is overturned, that will occur once again. There will be States where the littlest persons are free and those where they are still treated as property.

Our work will not be over with the demise of Roe v. Wade, it really only begins. Our goal is not simply to expose and oppose the current culture of death; it is to build a new culture of life, and a civilization of love to replace it.

This requires the abolition of the "new slavery" which has secured in law the treatment of little persons in the womb as property in our day.We need a new abolitionism in our day. It is time to end abortion.

I call on my fellow new abolitionists to take courage. History is on the side of freedom! Roe will go, and with it the struggle for freedom will continue, State by State.

Our children and grandchildren will look back on the horror of abortion as we now look at the horror of the first slavery.

We have only begun our work. Let us continue together. It is time to end abortion.

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