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The Sun Will Come Out . . . Tomorrow

January 26, 2009

The Words of President Obama and the Wisdom of Dr. King

by Nikolas T. Nikas and Dorinda C. Bordlee

In the third week of 2009, our nation experienced a civil rights solar eclipse of sorts – a “syzygy” of human rights.  In the science of astronomy, a syzygy (nope, that’s not a mispelling) is the alignment of three or more celestial bodies along a straight line.  The word is usually used in context with solar and lunar eclipses when the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon are in alignment.

The March for Life on the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade aligned in the same week with both the celebration of Martin Luther King Day and the historic inauguration of our nation’s first African-American President. This alignment of three social-political celestial bodies highlights the paradoxical triumph and tragedy of civil rights at this point in our nation’s history.

The aftermath of the infamous Roe decision – 50 million unborn children dead and at least that many women and men profoundly wounded – casts a deep shadow upon the landscape of American civil rights.  The Supreme Court’s illegitimate act of denying the most fundamental human right to an entire class of human beings blocks the bright light that should be coming from an inauguration that fulfills a significant part of Dr. King’s dream of human equality.

The shadow of Roe has dulled the consciences of many to such a degree that they cannot see the inconsistency of their very own words.  Millions no doubt wondered how President Barack Obama could miss the obvious contradictions between his abortion position and these words from his inaugural address:

“The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.”

All are equal? All deserve a chance? A God-given promise? How can we consider our highly-educated President to be consistent in speaking these words when his White House website states that “he been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women's rights under Roe v. Wade a priority in his Adminstration.”  Mr. Obama's politeness in waiting until the day after the March for Life to open the tax coffers to fund groups that perform or promote abortion overseas (unlike President Clinton who reversed the Mexico City Policy during the March for Life) shows that change has indeed arrived.

Has the Pro-life Movement’s strategy failed?  President Obama, like many, has urged us to abandon legislative and litigation efforts, and to focus on education alone. Indeed, he supports the bill known as FOCA, which purports to strip the democratic power from “we the people” to pass laws through our legislative bodies that regulate or prohibit abortion.

This tactic was not unknown to Dr. Martin Luther King.  In a 1956 address to the First Annual Institute on Non-Violence and Social Change, King discussed how he was being urged to abandon legal efforts regarding integration and to focus on education alone on the grounds that “morals cannot be legislated.”  Sound familiar?

Here is Dr. Martin Luther King’s response:

It is neither education nor legislation; it is both legislation and education.  I quite agree that it is impossible to change a man’s internal feelings merely through law.  But this really is not the intention of the law.  The law does not seek to change one’s internal feelings; it seeks rather to control the external effects of those internal feelings.

He then concluded with these memorable words: “For instance, the law cannot make a man love – religion and education must do that – but it can control his efforts to lynch.  . . . . [W]e must continue to struggle through legislation.”

At this moment in history, many will consider the pro-life movement’s legislative and litigation efforts to be impossible.  But we must remember that in 1963, when the idea of an African American President appeared to be a political impossibility, Dr. King showed us the way out of the darkness:

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Speaking the truth in love in the arenas of education, legislation and litigation is a basic and effective tool that we must continue to use to further the fundamental human right to life.  This strategy has resulted in the enactment of hundreds of pro-life laws in the states that have contributed to the dropping abortion rate.

We invite readers to sign on to this Pro-Life Message from the Heart to President Barack Obama.  In sending a letter to the President about what (and who) is on our hearts, perhaps he will be more open to hearing us when we speak our minds.  Perhaps he will realize his insensitivity to the pro-life movement’s cry of Roe’s injustice to children in the womb when he spoke of the “slaughter of innocents” in his inaugural address:

“…and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”

It is the unjust slaughter of the innocents through the terror of abortion, destructive human embryo experimentation and euthanasia that motivated hundreds of thousands of Americans, young and old, to participate in the 2009 March for Life in Washington, D.C., in the West Coast March for Life in San Francisco, and in marches across our nation.  Allow us to adopt your eloquent words, Mr. President: our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; Roe cannot outlast us, and we will defeat it.

 

— Nikolas T. Nikas and Dorinda C. Bordlee are attorneys and co-founders of Bioethics Defense Fund, a public interest law firm that advocates against the human-rights violations of abortion, human cloning/destructive embryo experiments, and physician-assisted suicide through litigation, legislation and education.

 

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A Temporary Defeat
By Anne Conlon

William Buckley liked to remind conservatives (and liberals) that there were no permanent victories, no permanent defeats. Four years ago, after George Bush’s reelection, the press saw mighty hordes of evangelicals everywhere on the political horizon; the urgent question then was would the Democrats—and even the nation’s two-party system—survive? On January 22  (Roe v. Wade day), 2005, Hillary Clinton startled many supporters when, in an address to New York’s Family Planning Advocates, she declared that abortion was “a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women,” one that while “guaranteed under our constitution,” should “not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances.”

What a difference an election cycle makes! I’d venture the only reason we’re talking about failure on the part of the pro-life movement is because the Republican Party failed to keep the White House. Self-identified pro-lifers who voted for Obama, I suspect, were motivated to do so not by a desire to change the pro-life movement’s strategy so much as by a desire to repudiate the president (and party) that prosecuted—and in their minds botched—the war on terror. Pace Obama’s contention during his Saddleback chat with Rick Warren, the abortion rate under Bush continued the decline it began in the Clinton years when a Republican-led Congress did much to educate an abortion-illiterate populace about the horrors of partial-birth abortion. I wonder if Republican pro-life successes under Bush—the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act—were not all it took to assuage the consciences of the Obama “pro-life” brigades. After all, while polls tell us most Americans object to most abortions, they also tell us most Americans want to keep abortion legal.  That, I believe, is the territory Douglas Kmiec now occupies.

Does Kmiec really believe that Obama-style socialism will cure America’s addiction to abortion? There is nothing sad, tragic, profound, or complicated about the abortion decision for Barack Obama—indeed, under his leadership the word “rare” (vis-à-vis abortion) was removed from the Democratic Party platform. Like Pilate, Obama washes his hands of it; quite simply, there is no baby until a woman decides she wants there to be one. At which point Obama will “strongly support” the (now) mother-to-be with a plethora of government programs, including a national healthcare plan that will not only pay for abortions but most likely seek to coerce doctors (and hospitals) into performing them. (Meanwhile, government funding for abstinence programs will likely be cut.) But if a woman doesn’t want to be a mother, then she is a victim, and her pregnancy, says Obama, a “punishment.” To spare her such, he will federalize (via signing FOCA) the Roe/Doe regime of abortion on demand. Does he (or Kmiec) really believe that rescinding all state and federal regulations will lower the abortion rate?

One last thought: Obama’s seemingly obsessive self-identification with Abraham Lincoln has serious implications. He will have none of blue states and red states; it is his aim to form a more perfect union. For him “change” doesn’t mean a more civil discourse or “Can’t we all just get along?” It means revolution, or maybe more accurately, resolution.  I suspect that Obama believes (as I believe) that when all the other issues are peeled away the unresolved abortion question is the root cause of the country’s political divisiveness. He will do everything in his power to marginalize the prolife movement, enlisting General Kmiec and others to carry his argument that government largesse can eliminate most abortions deeper into pro-life territory.  The election of a ruthless abortocrat is a defeat for the pro-life movement, but not a permanent one.  The movement will fail only if it fails in its mission to keep the pro-life proposition before the American people. This is the civil rights struggle of our time. One new strategy for the next four years suggests itself:  That we make the case for how unLincolnian Barack Obama really is.

Anne Conlon is managing editor of the Human Life Review and editor of the monthly newsletter, Catholic eye.
 
White Paper. When Does Human Life Begin?
White Paper: When Does Life Begin?Resolving the question of when human life begins is critical for advancing a reasoned public policy debate over abortion and human embryo research. This article considers the current scientific evidence in human embryology and addresses two central questions concerning the beginning of life: 1) in the course of sperm-egg interaction, when is a new cell formed that is distinct from either sperm or egg? and 2) is this new cell a new human organism—i.e., a new human being? Based on universally accepted scientific criteria, a new cell, the human zygote, comes into existence at the moment of sperm-egg fusion, an event that occurs in less than a second. Upon formation, the zygote immediately initiates a complex sequence of events that establish the molecular conditions required for continued embryonic development. The behavior of the zygote is radically unlike that of either sperm or egg separately and is characteristic of a human organism. Thus, the scientific evidence supports the conclusion that a zygote is a human organism and that the life of a new human being commences at a scientifically well defined “moment of conception.” This conclusion is objective, consistent with the factual evidence, and independent of any specific ethical, moral, political, or religious view of human life or of human embryos.  

 

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