To abort a child in
the womb is to abort a story, to tear out all but the first page of a human
story. To forget the evil of abortion is to forget their stories entirely and
consign them to oblivion. And, to celebrate this oblivion cannot be any more
than the sign of a kind of through-the-looking-glass world, where wrong is
right and vice versa. In the face of the recent change to New York’s laws, it
feels as though one is running backward, trampling underfoot the slow progress
of years of the pro-life movement.
Let us look at the
history of the pro-life movement in America. It began as the mainstream, standing
up to Margaret Sanger’s ludicrous and insidious plan for eugenics. Yet, by
1930, abortions became more common, especially in cases of ill health of the
mother. In Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, the
Supreme Court found a “right to privacy, and of course, in Roe v. Wade they used this to prevent any interference
in a woman’s abortion. Finally, to top it all off, the infamous statement used
to reaffirm Roe from Doe
v. Bolton: “At the
heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of
meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The demand has
shifted from “safe, legal, and rare” to #Shoutyourabortion.
Since that time,
states including Texas and Arizona have fought a defensive battle: limiting
abortions, passing laws to require ultrasounds or informing the parents of
minors about planned abortions. Each time pro-life leaders in government take
control, we think we’re winning. Each time pro-abortion leaders take back
control, we think we’ve lost. It feels like running on a treadmill — going
nowhere.
But we ought to
measure the success of the pro-life movement in a different way. Imagine a
scale: on one side we weigh the labor of more than 40 years of the pro-life
movement, and on the other we place a single life — a child saved from
abortion. Peculiarly enough, the scale tips in the child’s favor. Why? Because
there is a central tenet we accept before we join the March for Life, before we
make our posters and buy our yellow license plates: the human person is
infinitely valuable.
It may seem as if
an inevitable defeat is coming. After the March, after the elections, after
everything else, New York has proven that we cannot slacken our efforts. We
have so much more work ahead of us, but human persons, born or unborn, will always
be worthy of it.