Pro-Lifers

 

For pro-lifers, the winds are at our back

By Dave Andrusko
(I’m updating here something I wrote this awhile back. I believe it is more true today than when I first wrote this editorial.)

“By looking for earthquakes to describe changes in the political landscape, the effects of erosion and drift are easily overlooked, even though the end results can be at least as substantial.” — Greg Adams: “Abortion: Evidence of an Issue Evolution.”

Imagine you are an archeologist working at a famous, well-excavated site. You’ve been there for some time, when, seemingly out of the blue, you start making significant finds every 15 feet or so.
First, you’d be pleased, then you’d think about the responses of most of the handful of rival specialists who were more-than-casually aware of the site. With monotonous regularity, they had insisted all along that what you’d found to date was trivial – – and that if there was anything of significance in the locale, it would have long ago been unearthed.
But with the latest diggings, honeycombed with amazing artifacts, suddenly a larger, more comprehensive picture of the site came into focus, placing what you had discovered previously in a new light as well. Clearly, you are onto a major scientific discovery – – clearly, that is to you, but not to the habitual naysayers who’d always insisted the expedition was a waste of time.
Wedded to a position that was growing more untenable by the hour, these “experts” reacted as they always had: by offering lame, beside-the-point excuses in an attempt to explain away what you had uncovered.
You’d expect that from people whose thinking had long since fallen into an inescapable rut, or who may have had ulterior motives. But once news leaked out, what about those coming fresh to the evidence?
How would those not loaded down with the burden of defending an entrenched position for decades evaluate the discoveries, old as well as new? Would they be more receptive to the same old talking points (shouted perhaps a little bit louder), or to the discoveries’ soft but clear message?
Let’s think about this in the abortion context. “Insiders,” such as you and me, on one side, and the we’ve-never-met-an-abortion-we-wouldn’t-condone crowd, on the other side, have been privy to a thousand different discoveries made in the last decade or three. We celebrate them, pro-abortionists dismiss them as unimportant or attempt to bury them.
Unbeknownst to most people, there are two dimensions to these discoveries which are hugely damaging to anti-life forces: a greater appreciation of the marvelous complexity of the preborn child, and a growing shock as Americans learned to their horror what happens to that same baby in an abortion.
Even prior to 1973, no sophisticated medical tests or full-color four-dimensional ultrasounds were required to know that pregnant women carried living human beings. Those “discoveries” didn’t require a shovel to unearth. They were there, plain as day, for all to see.
But in the last 20 years, an appreciation of what world-renowned geneticist Jerome Lejeune once called the “symphony of life” has increasingly become part of our common cultural literacy. Not so long ago knowledge of the unborn’s shared humanity was limited to a select group, rather like the audience that could afford to attend a concert at Carnegie Hall.
Now, it’s akin to watching Great Performances on PBS. Thanks to medical technology, we can all enjoy the “music.”
Not so long ago the little ones were dismissed in elite circles as little more than stowaways, if not far worse. We now know that the developmental journey of unborn children is as thrilling as any voyage to a South Sea island written by Robert Lewis Stevenson.

Which is merely to say that maintaining the old dismissive orthodoxy–the unborn as “tissue”– is a far tougher sell when a baby’s first picture is an ultrasound, held to the refrigerator door with a small magnet, and admired daily. Seeing really is believing.

You may know there is an entire school of thought that argues that a major reason the old Soviet Union fell was because computers, e-mail, and fax machines undermined the regime’s rigid control of information. Once the corruption endemic to the Soviet State could no longer be hidden, the empire collapsed.

This is precisely the fate befalling the Abortion Establishment.
Each time we learn more about the beauty of fetal development, on the one hand, and truth seeps through about the unimaginable brutality that is abortion, on the other hand, a flag is planted a few miles closer to our ultimate destination: full protection for unborn children.
Partial-birth abortion, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a horror movie, opened many eyes and shifted public opinion–a fact even our benighted opposition concedes.
Likewise, gradually the debates over the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act, and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivor’s Protection Act are teaching fundamental truths. After 20 weeks, babies are capable of experience mind-boggling pain when they are killed in an abortion; we slaughter babies using techniques that come straight out of a slasher movie; and on occasion, babies do survive abortions.

When we do not avert our gaze, our conscience are profoundly touched. And nothing scares the Abortion Industry more than those occasions when the public sees the juxtaposition of the humanity of the unborn child and the inhumanity of abortion.
That happens more and more.
The winds are at our back.

Source: NRLC News