Please Choose the Culture of Life
“ While the deep concern of a woman bearing an unwanted child merits consideration and sympathy, it is my personal feeling that the legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life. Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.
On the question of the individual’s freedom of choice there are easily available birth control methods and information which women may employ to prevent or postpone pregnancy. But once life has begun, no matter at what stage of growth, it is my belief that termination should not be decided merely by desire.
When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception. ”
Excerpt of a letter from Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy to constituent Tom Dennelly, August 3, 1971, less than eighteen months prior to the Supreme Court’s publication of the opinion in Roe v. Wade.
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Twenty-five (25) years later, Former Pennsylvania Governor Robert P. Casey, another Democrat, would lament just four (4) years before his death from heart failure, that the political failure of his fellow Democrats to see the connection between abortion and social injustice would forever remain a great mystery to him. Not to see the connection, he would say, “requires a monumental act of denial.” Such that –
“As a cultural phenomenon, maybe it all has something to do with the very innocence and helplessness of children. A child makes demands upon us. A child needs our constant attention. A child calls us beyond ourselves, beyond our wants and desires. In this way children are the natural enemy of a culture inclined more and more to worship the Imperial Self – to hide, deny, or dispose of anything which interferes with our own wishes and whims. This is especially true of the special-needs child, the child not up to our worldly standards of health, beauty, or general acceptability.
At some point my own party, once devoted to lifting up the powerless, bought into this idea. We still hear the same noble-sounding phrases – “compassion,” “social justice,” “equal rights.” But they ring more and more hollow. In the abortion debate, they are thin veils concealing visions of raw self-interest. Whoever envisioned that the banner of “equal rights” would be unfurled over the abortion clinic? Who expected that we would ever even think of a mother and a child as having separate interests, as rivals in a dispute over power, much less enshrine the idea into law? Who ever imagined a political debate pitting mother against child, as if the child were some alien presence and not of her own flesh and blood?
Surely no two human beings could be more bound together, more natural allies in life and love than a mother and her baby. So, infants were always viewed by humanity, especially by women themselves, at most times in most places – until our time, when suddenly we find them driven apart, when the maternal instinct to nurture and protect the child is turned on its head.
Everything depends on that tie of love. Sever it, and you have not only set in motion countless little tragedies, you put society itself on a short route to chaos. The cause of this division is an ethic of pure selfishness which has seeped into our political lives, the “me-first” ethic my party has embraced and which will prove its own undoing. It is modern liberalism’s new and improved version of the old “rugged individualism” of Republicans: “Forget the powerless, forget the needs of others. Me first!”
As night follows day, violence follows this attitude. Whatever the pretenses, it is a hard creed, foreign to everything my party once stood for. You can see this in the strange terminology used in its defense. Even as the unborn child is sacrificed, the deed is dressed up in the language of love and concern, touching solicitude for the child’s own “quality of life.” A child, if born, will face hardship: therefore, he or she is better off dead. A baby will only burden one’s economic situation, or require public assistance, or cause inconvenience all around: therefore, do everyone the favor of aborting it. Just get rid of it, and all will be well. . .
A generation’s worth of experience with the self-gratification gospel has left most of us feeling a void, a deep emptiness in our culture. A generation’s climb into general affluence has left us feeling somehow poorer as a nation. At the heart of our political debate today is a fear for our whole culture, a fear that something has gone terribly wrong. And it has. Try as we might to put it all out of our minds, at the heart of that unease is abortion – the ultimate act of violence, the ultimate exploitation of the weak by the powerful. A society, least of all a society like ours, cannot turn its back on an entire class of human beings, wash its hands of so profound a problem, and still live at peace with itself. . .
Far from liberating women, abortion has become a lucrative industry, exploiting young women beyond anything ever imagined.
[T]oday’s Democratic Party [has] traded our principles for power – the fleeting power offered by loud and well-financed factions like NARAL and Planned Parenthood. . . It is a party that has lost its soul.”
Casey, Robert P., Fighting For Life, Word Publishing (1996), P. 147 – 189