Introduction

JUSTICE HARRY A. BLACKMUN'S DEATH last March gave the liberal press a fresh opportunity, in eulogizing him, to speak admiringly of his most famous (infamous) majority opinion-Roe v. Wade. The New York Times' Bob Herbert called him a man of "courage and integrity." Kate Michelman, president of NARRAL, said "His primary motivation was to see that the law was fair and that it provided dignity for the individual." Of course, for us, the occasion of Blackmun's death was an awful reminder of the massive injustice of the Roe decision, and the loss of millions of tiny American individuals since the day it (along with its companion piece, Doe v. Bolton) was handed down.

In this issue's lead article, Senior Editor William Murchison lays bare Blackmun's motivation in the Roe decision, and argues that what Blackmun did was not, as was his appointed duty, to interpret and remain faithful to the Constitution. Instead, he committed a "crime of the heart": a deliberate twisting of the role of the judiciary for his own ideological purposes. In order to emancipate women, and free us Americans from outdated views of sexuality, he and his colleagues found not only that a "right of personal privacy exists in the Constitution" but that it "is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."

In Murchison's extraordinary prose (how many times, while reading him, do we slap our foreheads and say, "what a wonderful way to put that!"), he writes that as Blackmun got older "The morality-on his own terms" of Roe became an obsession: "Roe became his pride and joy: a robust, bouncing full-term baby, against whom nothing was to be said." It was also a decision of which he said, prophetically, "I'll carry this one to my grave." That he did, not only because of the newlylegalized killing, but also, Murchison writes, Blackmun subverted "the stability of law itself" by promoting a "judiciary of sentiment" that tries to "square law itself with the restless aspirations of the modern age."

Roe v. Wade, a decision based not on science or fidelity to the Constitution, but on a particular social agenda, has lived on to be used to justify additional proabortion Court judgments, as Valparaiso Professor of Law Richard Stith explains in our next article, "Nominal Babies." Stith writes that Roe took a "nominalist" approach: "the unborn child has no real nature," that what it is is solely a matter of names, but at the moment of birth it becomes a real living entity. Blackmun's magic birth wall has since been "deconstructed" but it hasn't changed the law. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court refused to re-examine Blackmun's claim that the Court "need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins" but instead reaffirmed Roe, using as justification stare decisis, binding precedent.

At the same time the justices, by letting stand a Pennsylvania law which called for some abortion restrictions, did allow that the state could have "profound respect for the life of the unborn," thus being more realistic about prenatal life. As Professor Stith warns us, this realism, while a definite good, "cuts in two directions"-it could be used to protect prenatal life, or as in partial-birth abortion, to allow the killing of life admittedly human but not deemed valuable by society: the infirm, comatose, and unwanted born babies.

It is clear from the first two articles that abortion decisions in fact have been effected by those with radical views. Next, our esteemed contributor Professor George McKenna, in "The Miami Moderates" (named for a meeting last February in Miami of seventy "moderate" Republican leaders), asks the question: Why do politicians who support a more radical pro-abortion agenda than the majority of Americans call themselves "moderate"? He begins with Governor Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, "the doyenne of moderates" who chastised her Republican party at the meeting for appearing "mean-spirited and vindictive" regarding the President's impeachment hearings. "Moderate" Whitman emulated Clinton by vetoing a ban on partial-birth abortions, a procedure that, polls show, appalls most Americans, and she is consistent in her radical pro-abortion positions (even insisting that abortions be paid for by her constituents' taxes). McKenna takes us on a delightful trip through the land of the Republican "moderates": from their reactions to Clinton's impeachment hearings, to, more broadly, their role in the many skirmishes of the Great American Culture War. He even brings in for fun the delicious scandal of Jerry Falwell and Tinky Winky, the purple, "gay" Teletubbie, which is actually fitting: the "moderates" themselves seem to be confused about their true colors.

Senior Editor Ellen Wilson Fielding, in our next piece, changes the pace a bit, starting her stunning article on current American culture with a step back into her own memories of the 60s and 70s. Tracing her awareness of the "stripping away of the sacred" that has perhaps reached its most desolate point, she writes of our damaged faith in government, institutions, others, ourselves, and-most cruciallyGod. As she writes: "There is a thickness, a depth to life, that life-sapped of the sacred-loses, leaving us, in Milan Kundera's phrase, with a sense of the 'unbearable lightness of being."' Ellen's is an article of unsettling reflections: a profound rendering of the essence of what is "wrong with us."

Fielding concludes her piece with a reference to a Wall Street Journal column by Lorena Rodrigues Bottum (which we have reprinted as Appendix F) about the ordinary evil abortion has become, spoken about casually among women as an "unpleasant necessity," and closes with the scripture passage from Isaiah: "Can a mother forget her suckling child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb"? Our next author, National Review editorial associate Kathryn Jean Lopez, lets us in on the thoughts of some mothers who have not forgotten their aborted children. Miss Lopez discovered several web sites on the Internet, our most modern arena for "sharing," for women who have had abortions, and who are not "free and clear" of their decision.

In the instances Miss Lopez relates, women who are agonizing about their abortion decisions and their feelings afterwards have come together for support. "The freedom of choice has twisted into something that is hurting women," one woman wrote, and, while many of the women in the chat rooms might still call themselves "pro-choice," their poignant, disturbing messages offer proof that Blackmun's beloved Roe has enslaved many women in the pain of "Post Abortion Stress Syndrome," the name of one of the sites. As Miss Lopez writes, though ten years ago Surgeon General C. Everett Koop did not find enough evidence to support the existence of post-abortion syndrome, the "acknowledgement of the reality of postabortion emotional pain is becoming more mainstream."

Women who have abortions are victims of the abortion culture; it has long been a concern of this journal that our born children may also be suffering from our new found "freedoms." New contributor Diane Fisher, a psychologist and mother of three, thinks there certainly are repercussions, as she tackles for us the controversial question of day-care. Is day-care, as a recently much-publicized report seemed to say (see Fisher's article for the truth on that!) actually good for our children; is it all the same for our youngest ones to be away from Mommy (or Daddy) and in institutional care? Or are we in denial, because the truth (that our babies need us) doesn't fit in with our lifestyles or economic pressures? Fisher sees denial over day-care as an extension of our deeper denial over the humanity of the unborn, and even sees some disturbing precedents in ordinary German citizens' denial over the atrocities being committed right next door during the Holocaust, the latter reflection prompted by her own recent visit to Dachau.

In another article about the fate of our born children and our families, British contributor Lynette Burrows (in "Suffer, the Children") writes about the "fashionable crusade" of the "children's rights" movement in Europe, which purports to be for children's welfare, but which is actually involved in taking away parents' rights and putting the fate of children in the state's (unloving) hands. Burrows exposes the ideological partners involved in the movement; she also reports some absolutely shocking facts and statistics about social engineering and the forcible breaking up of families in Sweden, that great mecca and model for progressive thinkers.

We turn our minds next to a gratifying dissection of a philosophy so much at the bottom of the disturbing trends and practices we've been discussing. Father Francis Canavan, Professor Emeritus at Fordham University, examines "The Empiricist Mind" by taking Dr. Peter Singer (see "Infanticide Chic II: Professor Singer Goes to Princeton," HLR, Fall 1998) as an example of the empiricist par . . malfaisance? Canavan echoes Stith's earlier discussion of "nominalism" and "realism." To put it briefly, an empiricist only believes in what he sees: a fetus at its earliest stages is not human because it doesn't look human, a tadpole is not a frog, etc. Things do not have an essential nature; as Canavan writes: "a Nominalist never knows the essence of rose or what 'roseness' consists in, but only groups certain flowers under the name of 'rose' because they look sufficiently alike." Empiricists, by definition, do not believe in the transcendent-God, Order, a meaning to life, these are all intangibles. Their Creation story has to do with a "chance combination of gases." And so empiricists like Singer can recommend practices like infanticide that go against the core beliefs of the God-fearing. Canavan writes that his purpose is not to "shock and arouse a sense of horror" (certainly our readers are beyond that); he asks instead why people accept such "shallow empiricism that is presented to us as Science"-this pseudo-Science has produced deadly results.

And this brings us exactly to what Wesley Smith writes about in our final article, "Assisted Suicide: The Tip of the Iceberg." Mr. Smith, now a nationally-known expert on assisted suicide and euthanasia, writes that our traditional medical ethics are crumbling. What he dubs The Ethic, which is the traditional sanctity of life ethic (that all patients have "inherent moral worth") is rapidly being replaced by relativism: a person's worth is dependent on subjective attributes like "self-awareness" or "a sense of time." Smith points to the late Joseph Fletcher, one of the founders of modern bioethics, as an immense influence on current thought. Fletcher was a "truly radical utilitarian," who did not believe in universal human rights, and yet his radical ideas are increasingly put into practice, especially concerning endof-life decisions. A shocking example: it is no longer beyond the pale for ethicists to consider the harvesting (for transplant) of organs from the bodies of assisted suicides.

Smith wraps up his piece with, again, Peter Singer, a man who now represents the mainstreaming of the Godless trends in our ethics-imagine, he is slated to begin teaching young people at Princeton in the fall! This final article provides a nice summary of the overarching theme that runs through all the articles in this issue: the Great Culture War, and the extent to which many are unaware of the deadly serious nature of each battle. As Smith concludes: "Two paths lie before us: a culture of death that devalues and even countenances" the killing of many of us, or "A culture of life that embraces the utter human equality of us all."

Justice Blackmun is also the subject of our first Appendix, a marvelous noneulogy from the editors of National Review. Following is another National Review piece: written by Articles Editor Ramesh Ponnuru, it is the finest analysis we have read of the debate over the Clinton scandal, and whether or not it's "about sex." As Ponnuru writes, it's all about sex, as is the public division over abortion. The whole "privacy" issue was used, a la Blackmun, to allow for the activities baptized by the sexual revolution, which people, by and large, are not about to give up.

Thus the failure of America to really censure President Clinton for his behavior. In Appendix C, Professor Hadley Arkes gives evidence of a "public growing ever dimmer in its moral reflexes," led by such hypocrites as Senators Joseph Lieberman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who profess "moral concern," but fail to take strong moral positions-opting instead to "stand with their friends" (even when prenatal life hangs in the balance). Teresa Wagner does remind us, in Appendix D, that at least Senator Moynihan has taken a stand against partial-birth abortion, the ghastly procedure he has called "near-infanticide." However, although the majority of the American public feels profoundly uncomfortable with this procedure, partial-birth abortion bans in the states are challenged every step of the way by the medical and legal professions, and by the courts-all proving, says Wagner, that the extremism of the abortion lobby has far-reaching influence.

We next have two columns on real-life abortions. The first is by Rabbi Jacob Neusner, whose grand-nephew, to his and the grandparents' horror, was aborted in Israel. He asks the question: "how is mass abortion in the State of Israel. . . not compared to mass murder of Jewish children in German Europe?" The second (mentioned in Ellen Wilson Fielding's article) is a column by Lorena Bottum, who recounts a conversation among "ordinary, middle-class stay-at-home mothers"in a playground, of all places-about their abortions. The very "normalcy" of the scene was proof for Mrs. Bottum that the "safe, legal and rare" mantra of the politicians is ludicrous: legal abortion, for many, has become a mildly upsetting commonplace.

A sense of the surreal accompanied the news of the horrific events of April 20th, in Littleton Co., where 15 deaths seemed to be part of a gruesome game. In Appendix G, we reprint Peggy Noonan's masterful column from the Wall Street Journal, in which she tries to put her finger on what it is that disturbs our children. Her answer is our children's almost total immersion in the culture of death, so lamented by Pope John Paul II, a culture that, among other things, takes the killing of our youngest children so casually.

We're relieved to leave you with two columns of a more optimistic nature. Columnist George Will writes in Appendix H his suggestions for pro-life "realism" in the Republican party. Forget the Human Life Amendment, he says bluntly: "An America in which three quarters of the states would ratify" such an amendment wouldn't need it. On the other hand, there is a positive truth to disseminate: most Americans are troubled by casual abortion, and would support restrictions. The Democratic party, by pandering to abortion-rights zealots, has accepted an extreme view not reflective of the country at large, and it should be made to suffer for it (if only Republicans would be brave enough to point it out). In our final Appendix (), columnist John Leo reports on a study conducted by an organization headed by Faye Wattleton, former president of Planned Parenthood. Wattleton was "crushed" to find that women's support for abortion is going down, as is approval of premarital sex, and 75 percent of the women polled said religion had an important place in their lives.

So perhaps we have reached such lows that there is no place to go but up?

We hope so.

-MARIA McFADDEN

EDITOR

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Spring 1999
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