Posted on 01/20/2003 6:51:27 PM PST by Remedy
The 30th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision arrives later this month and it represents a good time to take stock of where the pro-life movement and, by extension, social conservatism, now stand.
We have a President whose commitment to the pro-life issue surpasses that of Richard Nixon; certainly that of Gerald Ford and George Herbert Walker Bush; and most likely even that of Ronald Reagan. Certainly, in their first two years in office, President Bush and his administration have taken strong stands on behalf of pro-life legislation and the Justice Department has challenged Oregon's euthanasia law.
The GOP's taking control of the U.S. Senate in last November's election and its continued control of the U.S. House are developments that have certainly been welcomed by pro-lifers, but it is no guarantee that a pro-life agenda can be achieved in this session.
For one thing, the Democrats have the numbers in the Senate to frustrate the passage of key pro-life legislation and the confirmation of federal judges who are committed to interpreting the law impartially. Nominees who are neither activist-oriented nor in line with the litmus tests demanded by the pro-abortion lobby and those Senators that do its bidding are likely to face a tough road to confirmation.
But as I had emphasized in my February 16, 1999 letter addressed to the conservative movement, I believe that we social conservatives and pro-lifers should still harbor significant concern about placing all our chips in the basket of politics. The pro-life movement and social conservatives did place most of our chips in that basket back in the 1980s and I think it is fair to say that we came away quite disappointed with the results.
This reevaluation of the pro-life strategy is long overdue and has been taking place in fits and starts for some time. But a new collection of essays that will be published later this month should help to give added momentum to the rethinking of strategy.
"Back to the Drawing Board: The Future of the Pro-Life Movement" (St. Augustine's Press) is edited by Teresa Wagner, a dynamic, young pro-family spokeswoman who had worked as a lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee and as a legal and policy analyst for the Family Research Council. The reassessment examines each of the five crucial spheres that will determine the movement's future: the law, medicine and science, politics, religion and the culture.
Contributors include such respected names as Human Events editor Terence P. Jeffrey, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), and my old colleagues in arms Phyllis Schlafly, James Dobson, and Dr. Mildred Jefferson. The range of contributors extends from Howard Phillips, the conservative's conservative, on the right to the thoughtful and principled syndicated columnist Nat Hentoff on the left. I'm pleased to see that former Boston mayor Raymond Flynn, a Democrat who served as Ambassador to the Vatican in the administration of Bill Clinton and who is now President of the Catholic Alliance, is one of the essayists.
My chapter discusses political engagement and in it I reflect upon my 1999 letter, making clear that the rush to interpret the letter as calling upon social conservatives to withdraw from politics was never accurate, but something promoted by the liberals in the news media. My point was that social conservatives had placed too much faith in politics and that we are no longer a 'moral majority' in the way that I had thought we were two decades ago.
There never was a call to have social conservatives stage a Dunkirk-like withdrawal from politics. The grassroots understood what I was saying about the need to develop counter-institutions not infected with the Politically Correct thinking now in vogue throughout much of society that maintains, for instance, it is not right to eat meat because a steer must be slaughtered but it is okay to abort a baby because the young child is only a "choice."
To this very day, many in the news media either miss or willfully turn a blind eye toward the developments taking place at the grassroots level that are in synch with what I had discussed and that provide hope that more and more people are dropping out of our PC society.
Social conservatives must stay politically active but we must also work harder to find new ways to change the culture. One idea in that vein is mentioned in passing in the chapter that I wrote but expounded upon in my recent commentary on "Social Marketing: The Next Frontier for Social Conservatives."
"Back to the Drawing Board" contains thought-provoking reading at exactly the right time that we should be thinking harder about how we can do more to protect life. More should be heard about this book in the coming weeks, and I hope Notable News Now readers and social conservatives will read it and give serious consideration to what the next direction of the pro-life movement should be in this new century.
(Paul M. Weyrich is chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.)
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Don't blame women. |
Homicide Based on the Killing of an Unborn Child -- In this essay, Alan Wasserstrom surveys the history of laws which prosecute feticide--the destruction of a human fetus--as homicide.
State Homicide Laws That Recognize Unborn Victims
The Unborn Victims of Violence Act (H.R. 503) recognizes unborn children as victims of federally prohibited crimes of violence. If someone injures or kills an unborn child while committing a violent federal crime against a pregnant woman, the assailant will be charged with a separate offense on behalf of the unborn child. The bill simply puts federal law behind the common sense recognition that when a criminal attacks a pregnant woman, and injures or kills her unborn child, he has claimed two human victims. The House passed H.R. 503 / vote: 252-172 April 26, 2001
Secondly, I agree with both of you that technically the pro-abortion argument has become the assertion that the adult is "more" human than the unborn child. However, I still think that the average person who believes abortion should remain legal hasn't looked at this question closely enough to have developed that distinction. The people that argue for legalized abortion on a regular basis may be making that distinction, but they don't represent the average person who feels uncomfortable even thinking about the issue. I freely admit that I don't have any real data to support my view. This is just a "sense" that I get from talking to people. I would welcome any data you have showing that most people are making the distinction that you explained.
WFTR
Bill
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I still think that the average person who believes abortion should remain legal hasn't looked at this question closely enough to have developed that distinction. |
The average person can afford to be wrong about the science. She can easily admit to being wrong or continue in ignorance.
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The people that argue for legalized abortion on a regular basis may be making that distinction |
These folks cannot afford to be wrong on the science, lest they be laughed out of existence.
Antonin Scalia and His Critics: The Church, the Courts, and the Death Penalty What the "pro-choice" American does not believe is that a human fetus is as fully a human life as Uncle Charlie.
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I freely admit that I don't have any real data to support my view. |
Scalia says "does not believe." The pros "do not want to believe." So, having lost the scientific debate on when a human being begins, they hope to win the supposed philosophical debate on personhood .
no person-no unborn child-has a right to access the bodily resources of an unwilling host. Unborn children may have a right to life, but that right to life ends where it encroaches upon a mother's right to bodily autonomy.
Human Embryo Research After the Genome The Orwellian terms "pre-embryo" and "potential human being" no longer have any scientific validity.
Statement - On Human Embryos and Stem Cell Research...
One of the great hallmarks of American law has been its solicitous protection of the lives of individuals, especially the vulnerable. ...–one of the great achievements of the modern world–is founded on the conviction that when the dignity of one human being is assaulted, all of us are threatened.
Current law against funding research in which human embryos are harmed and destroyed reflects well-established national and international legal and ethical norms against the misuse of any human being for research purposes. Since 1975, those norms have been applied to unborn children at every stage of development in the womb, and since 1995 they have been applied to the human embryo outside the womb as well. The existing law on human embryonic research is a reflection of universally accepted principles governing experiments on human subjects–principles reflected in the Nuremberg Code, the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and many other statements. Accordingly, members of the human species who cannot give informed consent for research should not be the subjects of an experiment unless they personally may benefit from it or the experiment carries no significant risk of harming them.
...the Supreme Court has never prevented the government from protecting prenatal life outside the abortion context, and public sentiment also seems even more opposed to government funding of embryo experimentation than to the funding of abortion. The laws of a number of states–including Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Utah–specifically protect embryonic human beings outside the womb. Most of these provisions prohibit experiments on embryos outside the womb.
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