Star Parker - Roe v Wade - Forty Years After

The number forty has great significance in the Bible.

Perhaps best known is the forty years that the Israelites were condemned to wander in the desert before being permitted entry into the Promised Land.

Maybe this mystical quantity will bear significance as we note, this month, the fortieth year since the Roe v Wade decision legalized abortion in America.

Forty years we have lived with the silent, and sometimes not so silent, holocaust in our midst as the lives of 55 million innocent and unborn children have been killed, plucked from their journey to enter this world.

Who were they? Who would they have become?

The unmarried graduate student who gave birth to hi-tech impresario and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, may well have aborted this child had her pregnancy occurred in 1973 rather than 1955.

This past week former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, recovering victim of a crazed gunman, visited, along with her husband Mark Kelly, Newtown, Connecticut, site of the latest horrible shooting incident.

In their public remarks, they expressed concern that our society has become “desensitized to acts of violence.”

Appropriate words, I think, that certainly should be considered in the broadest possible sense in our effort to grasp our willingness to tolerate, even nurture, the open and flourishing presence of evil in our society.

It takes a deadening of the soul to permit this, a state of being “desensitized.”

We know it because when those senses are awakened, our indifference and willingness to tolerate evil is pushed back.

When William Wilberforce fought to abolish the slave trade in England, he moved a boatload of the elite into proximity of a slave ship to smell the stench. Their senses were awakened and a major step forward was achieved to end the horror.

Reformed slave trader John Newton composed “Amazing Grace,” with the unforgettable line “Was blind but now I see.”

If there is good news, it is that, slowly, America seems to be coming to its senses regarding destruction of unborn children.

This week’s Time Magazine cover story announces “40 years ago abortion-rights activists won an epic victory with Roe v Wade: They’ve been losing ever since.”

But in noting that ultrasound has reduced the willingness of Americans to tolerate abortion, author of the story Kate Pickert misses the key point when she writes, “Thanks to prenatal ultrasound, Americans now understand what a fetus look like and that babies born as early as 24 weeks can now survive.”

The key point is that the graphic ultrasound picture, showing the growing and moving fetus, has raised awareness that this unborn child is alive and that abortion is murder.

Ultrasound is sensitizing a desensitized American public that has been willing to tolerate this horror over these forty years.

Wars are not won overnight. Victory is achieved battle by battle.

Wilberforce did not stop slavery, but he stopped the slave trade.

Lincoln’s first aspiration was not total abolishment of slavery in America, but making it illegal in new entrants to the Union.

A battle before us now, as the American soul awakens to the evil of abortion, is to end the expropriation of US taxpayer funds, which now provide almost half the budget of the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.

According to Rep. Marsha Blackburn(R-Tenn), Planned Parenthood’s latest annual report shows receipt of $542 million from US taxpayers. This is outrageous, particularly when every other day we witness a new confrontation in Washington to find ways to cut our trillion-dollar budget deficit.

Rep. Blackburn has introduced legislation to end this funding to large abortion providers. Every American should support this and help win this battle.

And we must continue to work to win the war and awaken the American soul, so that forty years after Roe v Wade we bring an end to the scourge of legal abortion in America.

Star Parker

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.

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Mike Adams - Aborting Hitler

Someone once asked me whether I would abort Adolf Hitler if I knew in advance he would try to launch a Holocaust against millions of Jews. I said I would not. That is because aborting Hitler would not have prevented the Holocaust. It would have justified it. The killing of millions of innocents does not begin with the killing of one innocent. It begins with the idea that in the larger scheme of things it is permissible to kill one innocent person.

The movie Judgment in Nuremburg (1961) shows that, even in Hollywood, Americans once appreciated this important principle. The movie is three hours long. But one only needs to watch the last ten minutes of the movie in order to see how far we have fallen in just a half-century.

For those who do not remember the end of the movie, Spencer Tracy plays an American judge who sentences former Nazis for their involvement in the Holocaust. One Nazi judge who sentenced innocents to death was himself sentenced to life in prison. As the sentence is read, he stares off in disbelief. He initially believes he is innocent because he was simply following the law. He later realizes his life sentence was just.

Only a couple of days after he is sentenced, the former Nazi judge requests that the American judge visit him in his jail cell. As he faces the man who sentenced him, he makes an odd request: he asks him to keep his personal memoirs - adding that they must be placed in the hands of a man who can be trusted. It is then that he declares the sentence passed upon him was just.

After pausing for a moment, the condemned Nazi judge says of the millions of dead Jews, “Those millions of people. I never knew it would come to that.” Spencer Tracy, playing the American judge, responds with one of the most profound lines of his storied acting career saying, “It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”

That has been the story of the American Holocaust as well. It began in 1966 in my native state of Mississippi. Just two years after I was born, a law was passed that made it legal to abort in the case of rape or incest. But then, the very next year, Colorado passed legislation allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the health of the mother.

Then the floodgates were opened. By the end of the year, several states were pushing legislation modeled after the Colorado statute. Within just six years, abortion for mere convenience was not just permitted by several states. It was enshrined as a fundamental constitutional right.

Some have declared that they will not rest until Roe v. Wade is overturned. Others say that is too lofty a goal. I disagree. I believe it is too shortsighted. We must reach further back if we want to reverse our moral free fall. Pre-1973 thinking is not enough. We must go back to the time when no state authorized the killing of innocents – a time when only the rapist, not the product of rape, was eligible for a sentence of death.

Ideas have consequences. And so do exceptions. One of the consequences of embracing an evil exception is that it hardens our hearts and clouds our thinking in advance of our consideration of other exceptions. Eventually we come to a point where we cannot imagine life without that initial exception.

It is fitting that it all began in Mississippi. We have a legacy of executing innocents by denying their personhood. It happened with slavery. It happened again with abortion. Now we have learned to justify our own Holocaust. We didn’t need Hitler after all.

Mike Adams

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Mike Adams

Mike Adams is a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and author of Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts "Womyn" On Campus.

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