by John Ruskin
Dr. Harold O.J. Brown, Ph.D., has an excellent article published by The Howard Center entitled "No diga mentiras", translated: "Don't tell lies". In it Brown takes to task all of us (including the President) for believing, or remaining silent about, the great lie that has made our shining city on a hill no better than the genocidal tyrannies of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.
Brown's article can be accessed here; or can be found by clicking the link below. Reading it in its entirety is worth the effort.
No Diga Mentiras
By Harold O.J. Brown, Ph.D.
Author’s note: These pages were composed on a small island in north central Florida, without access to libraries: hence the paucity of footnotes. Together with the late James McFadden, Dr. C. Everett Koop, and others, I have been deeply involved in the struggle for human life since Roe v. Wade.
In a conversation this past December, one of the current pro-life leaders told me of his sorrow that the leader we so trusted, George W. Bush, had failed to use his power when it was unchallenged and has now been reduced to a kind of caretaker until the next presidential elections. I write these deeply personal lines to encourage others not to despair, but to sound a clarion call to him and all leaders, No diga mentiras! Do not tell lies, tell the truth!
In January 1973, when your editor was on the staff of Christianity Today, he attended a meeting of Christian lawyers and physicians discussing abortion. The general attitude was anti-abortion with some discussion of whether certain relaxations of the prohibition might be acceptable. In the 1972 general elections, two states, Michigan and North Dakota, had had referenda intended to legalize abortion under certain circumstances. Although a pro-abortion victory had been expected, especially in Michigan, both referenda came out solidly anti-abortion, Michigan 2:1, North Dakota 3:1. As all of us at the gathering were generally opposed to elective abortion, we considered these referenda a very positive sign. The people did not favor abortion.
The meeting took place on the weekend of January 20-21. We knew that the Texas abortion law was being considered by the Supreme Court, but had not the slightest suspicion of what was going to happen. On the following Monday, by a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade, and the associated decision Doe v. Bolton. All of the abortion laws of all fifty states, including those who had begun to legalize abortion under certain conditions, were overthrown and replaced with limitless abortion freedom.
What was the rationale for Roe? Without any particular medical or biological justification, pregnancy was divided into three trimesters. Abortion was declared legal on demand for the first three months. During the second trimester, it could be regulated, but only in the interest of protecting the mother’s health. In the third trimester, as viability was becoming evident, it could be regulated or even prohibited, provided it was always permitted when the mother’s life or health were at risk. Health was defined so loosely in the associated decision, Doe, that any serious physical, psychological, or emotional distress could justify abortion. In other words, abortion was to be available more or less on demand throughout the nine months of pregnancy. Even some of the most ardent abortion advocates were surprised. Attorney Harriet Pilpel, a leader in the pro-abortion movement, said “More than we expected or even wanted.”
The decision was hailed in the Washington Post, which treated it as a wonderful deed. “Court Legalizes Abortion Early in Pregnancy,” said the headline. That was true. But if one turned to the inside pages, it became clear that it also legalized it in the middle of pregnancy and also just before the end, right up to live birth.[1] It was a sweeping decision, but reported in a way that concealed its full extent. Even today Roe is often described as approving abortion early in pregnancy, as though it did not actually approve it right up to birth.
Throughout the whole thirty-three years that have passed since Roe, it seems that the majority of the American people have remained unaware of the fact that abortion is legal up to live birth. It has become the most common surgical procedure in America after circumcision. Since the decision was handed down, the nine months of gestation have become the most dangerous phase of the life of a developing child. Nine months in the womb are more dangerous for a child in America than combat is for a soldier in Iraq. American abortion laws seem inconceivably cruel to most Europeans, even the most liberal. They find asthem as incredible as many of us used to find stories about the Nazi extermination camps. But, alas, like those it is true. More than once our courts, even the highest, have explicitly affirmed the right to kill right up to birth. This absolute liberty is being challenged again, at least where late-term abortions are concerned. One can hope for a change, but so far it has not happened.
Up to birth? On April 6, 2002, after driving to Hernando, Florida, I met my daughter at the door of her house. She held a small bundle out to me and said, “Would you like to hold him?” He was a tiny boy, Alexander, a bit over five pounds, born four weeks early. The date was still three and one-half weeks ahead of his scheduled birth. As our courts, including the Supreme Court, have repeatedly decreed, even at that very late date, after eight months’ gestation, he would have been a legitimate target of “partial birth” abortion if his expectant mother had not wanted him.
Moral Insanity
Although I have no German ancestry, I have become very familiar with the German language, history, and literature. Artistically, scientifically, musically, theologically, the Germans have been the most gifted and productive people in the world. They have also produced the world’s best-known and vicious concentration camps. Why did their artistic, scientific, musical, and theological eminence not reveal to them what they were doing, to the Jews, to the rest of Europe, and ultimately to themselves? Was the whole German nation demented? The great Eastern Orthodox scholar Georges Florovsky used to speak of what he called moral insanity, an affliction that can affect a nation as well as individuals. The extermination of the Jews and all other “sub-humans” can only be viewed as morally insane. What should we say about the extermination of millions of the unwanted unborn?
Militarily, the Germans were at the top: the French legal scholar and lay theologian Jacques Ellul, who fought against them in the French army until it was defeated and in the Resistance after that, observed in his classic essay Propagandes that it took a three-to-one superiority to defeat them in the west, and ten-to-one to do so in the east. He attributes this astonishing military potency in large measure to their uniquely effective propaganda. Their eyes were closed to the horrible realities of their conduct and the death and destruction they were thereby calling down on themselves. They were absolutely convinced of the rightness of their cause.
In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen contends that the German people as a whole were aware of what they were doing to the Jews and others, and concurred with it. I find the charge of general guilt hard to swallow. It is hard for me, with my personal contact with Germans and Germany and my appreciation for German accomplishments, really to understand the horrors that Germans perpetrated. How is it possible that such a talented nation could devote itself to such debased cruelty? How could they not realize that they were calling the wrath of the world and the judgment of God down upon themselves?
I do not belong to the strange clique of Holocaust deniers. Nevertheless, as horrible as the Nazi crimes were, alas, they were not unique. In the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Soviet judges sat with the Americans, British, and French, although the Soviet conduct was hardly blameless. I have a slight personal connection to the concentration camps, in that one of my mother’s uncles, a minister, was imprisoned in Dachau. His youngest brother, an engineer, was consigned by the conquering Soviets to Siberia, where all trace of him was lost. The Germans perpetrated one set of horrors, the Russians another. Eastern Europeans old enough to remember often say, “The Germans were terrible, the Russians were worse.” But the Russians won; the Germans lost.
Are we modern, scientific, democratic Americans immune to the temptation to genocidal atrocities? The Nazis killed perhaps twelve million, the Soviets even more. The Anglo-American air forces created their own horrors, fire-storms in Germany and Tokyo, atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, that was war, and we did not start it. In peace since Roe, we Americans have already done away, safely and legally to use President Clinton’s language, with forty-five million unborn children. Do we as a nation have any sense of national evil or of impending judgment? Will future historians speak of America’s Willing Executioners?
The Germans were traditionally Christian. Did they not suspect that they were calling divine judgment down? The ghastly persecutions perpetrated upon Jews caused some Jews to doubt the reality or goodness of God. Germans had to ask themselves a different question: not, why did God allow this to be done to us, but rather, why did God permit us to do this? If the storm clouds gather and our future as the world’s richest and most powerful democracy grows somber, will we begin to ask, why did God let us exterminate our progeny?
Otto Rodenberg, a Lutheran pastor, was the only German I ever met who admitted having believed in Hitler. A destroyer officer during the war, Rodenberg lost his first wife in a British air raid. He told me, “I believed in the Führer, and when we were conquered, my world collapsed.” Rodenberg found his way back to faith in God, studied theology in Marburg, and became a pastor. He told me, “Many of our theologians cannot stand the thought of a personal God, a God who acts, because if they do, they will have to acknowledge that it was His hand that struck us.”
Who Knows?
Does that have any implications for our frustrating lack of success in our war on terror? Could we as a nation possibly be doing anything to call down judgment upon ourselves? The German people at least had a sort of scapegoat in the Führer: “He made us do it.” Who is making us?
We in the United States are very proud of our democracy. We export it, whether others want to buy or not. Our great goal in World War I was to “make the world safe for democracy.” Now we are making similar efforts in the Middle East. But are we not deceiving ourselves about the nature of our democracy in America? As a people, we have no excuse for mass abortion carnage. We have no Führer. Supposedly we govern ourselves, but our ability to do so was overridden by Roe. Our fault is not that the Court had its way, but that for thirty-odd years since Roe, we have done nothing effective against it. Depending on the year, abortion takes the life of one in four, sometimes one in three unborn children. If democracy rules in America, then we the people are responsible for what Father Paul Marx called The Silent Holocaust.
If we recognize the evil of mass abortion, can we legitimately say, “The Court made us do it”? As a people we did not make or solicit the decision, but like the Germans with the Holocaust, we have a share in perpetrating it. We do it to unborn children in a far more genteel way than the Nazis did to Jews. No trains of jammed-full boxcars take babies to be “terminated.” They are taken there by women who should have been their mothers, by fathers, friends, and relatives. The procedure is carried out not in crowded gas chambers, but in clean operating rooms; not by booted thugs, but by white-garbed, well-paid physicians and nurses.
The possibility that the people will wake up to what is being done to us is limited by the fact that the truth is seldom told us. Our basic sources of information are the media. Today it is increasingly the electronic media that are important, but in 1973 it was primarily the newspapers. The Washington Post headlined the news that the Supreme Court had legalized abortion early in pregnancy. It had done that. Inside, the Post went on to report that it also legalized it in the middle of pregnancy and, under certain easily fulfilled conditions, up to birth. “Early in pregnancy” is emphasized, and the whole truth is tucked away on inside pages.
After the great Republican victories of 2004, some of us in the pro-life movement approached our pro-life President and other leaders with what seemed a simple request: just tell the people the truth about what we are doing to ourselves. For example, ask, “Whatever you think about abortion, can it be good for America to kill one-quarter of every new generation?” For months we received only the answer that a computer gives to one who puts in an incorrect PIN: Access denied.
Even today, in spite of the ongoing struggles over partial birth abortion, many Americans will still tell you that abortion is legal “early in pregnancy.” That is true, but it is not the whole truth. To put it this way is at least a half-lie, apparently necessary to keep the people of the United States Blackman’s willing abortionists. Do we all really not know? Or is our apparent ignorance just a sign that, like Hitler’s willing executioners, Americans don’t want to know what we are doing to the next generation? If we do not know, does not He who weighs the hearts know (Proverbs 24:12)?
Ineffectual Countermeasures
Some of the leaders in the evangelical Protestant community reacted with horror to Roe. Harold Lindsell, editor of Christianity Today, immediately recognized the atrocious nature of the decision and commissioned me to write a lead editorial denouncing it. At the time, we thought that we were sounding American Protestants a trumpet call to arms, a summons to rise up and defend the unborn, the littlest beings made in the image of God. What we had not realized was the degree to which the Supreme Court was taken as absolutely supreme. We were, it seems, only voices crying in a wilderness.
Before Roe, anti-abortion activity had been largely confined to Roman Catholics, for whom state laws do not outrank divine commands. In fact, some Protestant sources seem to have thought that it was such a Catholic issue that it should be left entirely to them. The war-cry that was raised by Christianity Today went largely unheeded.
Americans seem to look on the Supreme Court as infallible and invincible. I knew that before the decision, President Nixon had spoken out against abortion. When I ran into one of his staff on Pennsylvania Avenue, I asked him what the President intended to do or say about Roe. “Why, what should he do?” he replied. “The Court has spoken.” The Court’s power is in fact virtually invincible, since it can be overturned only by an amendment to the Constitution. (It is true that the Congress has the authority, under the Constitution, to limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, but that requires a level of civil courage that Congress does not seem to have.)
A fresh start
In 1975, two years after Roe, after expending a fair amount of energy in protest and getting little support, I went to a meeting in New Orleans. There I encountered the famous surgeon, C. Everett Koop. In his address, he predicted ten evil consequences of abortion, all of which have since come to pass, beginning with euthanasia of “defective” newborns. We talked about the need to arouse America’s sleeping Protestants to the self-imposed evil and proposed organizing a group to do this. Evangelist Billy Graham expressed his support and offered his office in Montreat, North Carolina, for a planning session.
The Christian Action Council was formed that year in July. We received advice and encouragement from James McFadden, editor of the Human Life Review. At that early stage, there was agitation for a constitutional amendment, the only effective way of putting a rein on the Court. We made getting an amendment our primary focus and did so for years, but with no success.
Despite our small beginnings, the Council attracted some political attention, and I was invited to testify before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Asked to tell them what I would say, I proposed to speak about the demographic consequences of abortion. This was so odious to the chairman, Senator Birch Bayh, a Democrat of Indiana, that I was not allowed to testify.
The consequences of the prediction I was not permitted to make have nevertheless occurred. The Population Bomb (Paul Ehrlich) has been overtaken by the Birth Dearth (Ben Wattenberg). By 2010, the number of unborn lives destroyed since Roe will approach fifty million. Refusal to face facts does not prevent them from happening. The constant refusal by government and the media to acknowledge the genocidal consequences of mass abortions has brought them down on us in the looming Social Security crisis. It is evident that the group of those eligible to receive benefits is growing while the group of tax-paying younger people is not. This is being partly counteracted by massive illegal immigration, another reality that we find very hard to look at critically. What is lacking all over the field is truth.
A trumpet sounds
The sleep of reason, the Spanish proverb says, produces monsters. American Protestants, particularly the evangelicals, were rudely shaken out of their sleep by a little-known American thinker living in the Canton of Vaud in Switzerland, Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer, a Presbyterian minister. Together with his son Franky (now Frank) and Dr. Koop, he produced a series of five films entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Shown in churches and schools around the nation, this series so aroused the evangelical public that now the word evangelical is assumed to mean anti-abortion.
It is hard to understand why a nation that has the greatest scruples about capital punishment for murderers should be totally committed to applying it to unwanted babies. Although we not only allow but also endorse and practice abortion en masse, the people of the United States hardly want to acknowledge them as homicides. We hesitate to apply capital punishment to a murderer and worry about whether lethal injection may cause pain or be cruel. The only way to avoid the knowledge that we allow mass homicides is by denying the truth.
In our abortion debates, truth is entirely lacking. The post-war German constitution contains a guarantee of the right to life. Ours does not, no doubt because in 1776 that right was taken for granted. After their demented conduct under the Nazis, the Germans found it necessary to be explicit and wrote it into their new constitution. Thus in 1975, a German high court decision could state the truth that our justices do not seem to suspect: “The usual language, termination of pregnancy cannot conceal the fact that abortion is a homicidal act.” Why do our American people refuse to see the truth? And why do our politicians and our media seldom if ever mention it?
Dreams
In 2003, thirty years after Roe, it seemed that the nation was no closer to acknowledging what it is doing to the next generation than it was in 1973. That year I had an experience that suggested what can and should be done to make leaders and people see the light, and to abandon the strange principle that the right to choose abortion is more important than the right to live.
Having grown up in Florida, along with many children whose mother tongue was Spanish, I had a life-long interest in the pre-Columbian civilizations of what we now call Latin America, the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Incas. In January of the year 2003, a year that turned out to be very significant for the United States and for the world, my wife and I visited the great Maya site Chichen Itza for the third time. We stayed at the Hacienda Chichen, an inn surrounded by buildings erected by earlier archeological teams for their housing while exploring the sites.
One night, I woke up at two o’clock and went out to sit in the moonlight on the porch of our little lodging. Chichen Itza is a place to think about the past, the greatness and beauty of the Mayan civilization, and to ask why they abandoned their cities. It is a wonderful illustration of human creativity and its impermanence. It is also a place to think about our own future. President Bush would soon be delivering his State of the Union message, perhaps telling us what was going to come next in our War on Terrorism. What was he going to say?
In a sort of a waking dream, I suddenly remembered a song, No diga mentiras. Some dreams can have tremendous impact. In the fourth-century struggle for control of the Roman Empire, the Augustus Constantine (one of four) dreamt of a cross with the message, In hoc signo, vinces, In this sign, conquer. His soldiers put the Chi-Rho (the first letters of the word Christ in Greek) on their shields and won.
With no legions to command like Constantine, no soldiers to order to paint it on their shields, I can only tell those who will listen that No diga mentiras are words that we must write on our own hearts — and on the foreheads of our leaders.
When our children were small, we had a children’s tape recording celebrating the Ten Commandments. When the singer got to the Ninth, “Thou shalt not bear false witness,”[2] she sang, “No diga mentiras,” “Don’t tell lies.” Why she switched to Spanish was not explained. She went on, “Angels don’t lie. That’s why they can fly.” Whether this is true about angels or not, the mandate was plain: don’t tell lies. If that command, and the corollary, Diga la verdad, tell the truth, were imbedded in the hearts and minds of our people and our leaders, our present would be different and our future brighter.
Can we learn from all that we know about Rome? Or what little we know about the Mayans? Why do empires fall? Why do people abandon their cities? Why did Rome, with her scholars, philosophers, generals, and priests not see what they were bringing down upon themselves? We do not know why the Mayas left their cities, leaving us with marvelous monuments to the grandeur and transience of man. But we do see that even the best builders may not build for the future.
The lovely grounds of the Hacienda Chichen are only a few hundred yards from the Castillo. The grand pyramid was laid out to match the movements of the sun, showing astrological and architectural planning and achievement that would be hard to match even with today’s technology. What a place to reflect on the future of our own nation! And what a strange message resounded in my memory! At Hacienda Chichen in the year 2003, I heard that admonition No diga mentiras ringing in my ears in the darkness of the Mayan night.
Mentiras?
The United States are mired in mentiras. More and more aspects of our society are based on lies and deception. One of the most drastic was that imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court on the nation in 1973. Roe v. Wade made abortion on demand universally available in the United States. It could be had, for any reason or for no reason at all, as dissenting Associate Justice Byron White said. It was based on a lie, on one grand lie and a score of lesser ones. We do not know, the Court maintained, when human life begins. We don’t? This lie has cost the nation lives amounting to twenty percent of our native-born population. It may be a reason why we silently submit to the constant influx of illegal immigrants.[3]
The Justices, or at least the concurring seven, told us that they just cannot speculate when human life begins. Can that apparently modest statement be true? Does anyone who had biology in high school, not to mention embryology in college or medical school, not know when a new human life begins? Who does not know that a new life begins when the man’s sperm penetrates the woman’s ovum?
In a strange kind of self-delusion, the Court decided, if at any time in pregnancy a child may not be a human being, then at every time in pregnancy, throughout the nine months, it may be terminated, “safely and legally,” of course, but dead all the same. In his concurring opinion, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, “This is not a sweeping decision.” What would have been a sweeping decision — mandatory abortion of one out of every two newly conceived lives?
No Terror
This lie, alas, is largely unrecognized. Abortion on demand is a reality that daily eats away at the substance of American life, consuming one in four, sometimes one in three unborn children. Compare it to the terrorist attacks of September 11. They evoked an intense reaction. Now we are undertaking a massive effort to reshape the Middle East. Compare them to the abortion holocaust, which has evoked no similar consequences. The terrorist attacks that day cost three thousand lives. If we had such attacks every day for a year, we would be extinguishing only three-fourths as many lives as our physicians destroy every year. They receive pay, not punishment. It must be acknowledged that a very substantial segment of the medical community detests abortion and refuses to participate, but the abortionists prosper.
We resemble the man afflicted with a curable cancer, who, instead of getting a diagnosis and looking for therapy, is preoccupied with a painful toothache. We have devoted billions of dollars and thousands of lives to deal with 9/11, while we continue to destroy ourselves, more every day than the terrorists killed in September, and more in a month than the “insurgents” and “militants” kill in a year.
War
It would require a war of horrible dimensions to take the number of lives that is destroyed in hospitals daily. No one, and certainly not this editor, would suggest that we should ignore 9/11. But, America: no diga mentiras, diga la verdad. President Bush went on national television and proclaimed, “We are at war!” Was that the truth? As hyperbole, it was justifiable, but truth it was not.
Remember Pearl Harbor. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese navy attacked Pearl Harbor. What did President Roosevelt say? “A day that shall live in infamy,” but not, “We are at war.” Instead he called on Congress to declare war. Then we were at war. Could Congress have declared war on September 12, if Bush had asked? No, because they would not have known against whom to declare it.
Two years after 9/11, just weeks after I was at Chichen Itza, President Bush decided to invade Iraq. Congress authorized the use of force, but it did not declare war. What did we do? Invasion is an act of war. Did we declare war? No, as a matter of fact. Did we wage war, commit acts of war? Indeed we did. We conquered a sovereign nation with which we were formally at peace. We sought and captured its president, and arranged for a court to try him and to condemn him to death. On last December 29, Saddam Hussein was turned over from U.S. military custody to Iraqi officials, to Iraqi hangmen. There seems little doubt that Hussein had done many things deserving of death, many times over.
Why did we do all this? And how do we justify it? The Iraqis were gathering nuclear weapons and other tools of mass destruction, or so we were told. Was that the truth? Perhaps. So the President said. Was he telling the truth or merely his best guess at the truth? If true, was it a valid casus belli? Is trying to obtain nuclear weapons an act of war? What about the other nations who we know have nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union, the British, the French, the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis, and perhaps the Israelis and the Swiss? Now even the North Koreans have some, at least one or two. And Iran is boasting that it soon will. Why this one and not others? Was Iraq on the road to nuclear weapons? Do we really know? And shall we ever know? Is there no one in government to whom we can say, No diga mentiras, diga la verdad, and expect to be heeded?
Proportionality
For several months, troubles in the operations that we are carrying on in Iraq have disturbed the American people more than 9/11. We are causing more damage, to ourselves and to others, than we suffered. The way that we have chosen to deal with Iraq is costing more money and more lives than the original atrocity took. The Republican majorities have been thrown out of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Not quite three thousand were killed on September 11. By the New Year 2007, the number of American soldiers lost in Iraq surpassed that. Of course those are only our own losses; we are not counting those we have killed or those who die daily in civil unrest.
Is the impact of our war on a suspected aggressor nation, and thereby on the terrorist movement, great enough to justify the losses we are suffering, not to mention the destruction and disorder we are causing in Iraq? We are not claiming to have won the “war” there, or even really to be winning it. Does it make sense to fight on? That is what we are being told. Some accept it; many do not. For ordinary citizens, the truth about all of these things is impossible to ascertain, or it seems to be: the truth about the cost of abortion is plainly evident. Why will no one listen to the truth about the ongoing carnage that we are inflicting on the coming generations? Losses on 9/11 were bad, growing losses in Iraq are worse. But far worse still is the unrecognized carnage that we are inflicting on ourselves.
The great betrayal
On September 11, 2001, more American babies were aborted — “terminated, safely and legally” — than were killed in all four hijackings and crashes altogether. And also on September 10, and 12, and 9, and 13, and so on. Do 3,000 victims of terrorism count the same as 4,000 abortions? No, evidently they do not. For the former, “We are at war!” For the latter, silence. How can we justify the violence of our reaction to 9/11 while letting the extermination of the unborn continue? The answer is simple. We could see the Trade Tower and Pentagon assaults on television. The abortions are hidden.
During the Nazi era, the Germans exterminated perhaps six million Jews, plus millions of other victims. They boasted of their military victories, but said nothing about their extermination camps. Did the German people know? I went to Germany as a Fulbright scholar in the fall of 1953, only eight years after the end of the war. No one I met acknowledged having been aware of the camps — concentration camps, yes, but extermination camps? Wir sind zivilisiert! We are civilized!
Sometimes when ordinary Germans heard that atrocities were being committed, they would ask, “Does the Führer know?” They assumed that if he knew, he would stop it. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen makes the opposite contention: not only the Führer knew, the people also knew, and they did not oppose it. Therefore, he argues, they bear a share of the guilt for Hitler’s crimes. His interpretation makes sense. How could they not know? It was never publicly stated that Jews, or anyone else for that matter, were simply being exterminated. Officially it was stated that Jews were being “resettled in the east.”
How can it have been possible that the “resettlement” of large numbers of Jews, after years of public abuse, extortion, and murder, was not seen for what it was? Perhaps some really did not see it. Certainly it was not a subject for dinner-table discussion. Albrecht Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister, professing ignorance, said, “I did not know, because I did not want to know.” And our own abortions, “anticipated murder,” to quote Tertullian, that early theologian: do we really not know?
Is it more reasonable to think that our president does not know than it was to ask, “Does the Führer know?” When we speak of abortions approaching fifty million, should we even ask, “Does the President know?” Of course he knows. If he really did not know, that might excuse his silence. If he does know, he should tell us. But he says nothing. President Clinton thought that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” But did he ever encounter one that he would prevent, even a partial birth abortion? He vetoed a ban on that procedure. But perhaps he, too, did not know. After all, perhaps even Nazi Economics Minister Speer did not know.
In the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush did seem to know. During that first campaign, he spoke of it as killing the unborn. Many of us, who worked for Mr. Bush in the 2000 campaign, expected him to begin to try to do something about the ongoing abortion carnage. We know that the president cannot change the law. We know that even the Congress is virtually powerless when it comes to changing a situation established by the Supreme Court.
What could Mr. Bush have done to change the situation? After all, the Court had spoken, more than once. Our suggestion was simple, Diga la verdad, tell the truth. Tell the people what we are doing to ourselves. We thought that he knew. The challenge that confronted him in the terrorist attacks of September 11 certainly preoccupied him, leaving some of us thinking, he will get around to it. After his resounding victory in 2004, we thought that surely this victory would enable him to start telling the truth about our self-inflicted suicide. But he had other things on his mind.
The President, despite his preoccupation with the war in Iraq, was willing to visit all fifty states to plead for changes in Social Security. Did he have no time to speak out about the ongoing atrocity that is one of the reasons for the danger to Social Security? There are not enough young people coming into the population, because somewhat between one in three and one in four pregnancies are aborted.
Care Net, the new name for the Christian Action Council that together with Dr. C. Everett Koop and a few others I helped to found, deals with well over one hundred thousand women and girls annually. In the year 2004, Care Net helped one hundred thousand choose life. Should we not be able to get the President’s ear? We have tried several times to approach the him, even through his assistant for faith-related services. Did he listen? No reply.
We do not intend to ask for political actions, but simply for telling the truth. He does not refuse to see us. He simply does not answer. Does he know that we are knocking on his door? Perhaps not. But if not, why not? Does he have no assistant who will tell him? Is the pro-life candidate that we elected and reelected closing his mind? If we are wrong, let him tell us. Silence can be golden, but not this silence.
Early in the anti-abortion movement I had on my living-room table a photo of four aborted babies in a black bag, “one morning’s work at a Canadian abortion facility.” A guest, a banker’s wife, looked at it in horror, saying, “I did not know it was like this.” “Sarah,” I asked, “You have four children. What did you think it would be like?”
Do the American people know what we are doing to every coming generation, weeding out one out of every three or four unborn children, to a grand total of more than forty-five million since 1973? Are we truly ignorant, or are we America’s willing abortionists? How can we not sense the hole that their absence creates, into which illegal immigrants plunge? Can it be that we are somehow unconsciously trying to making up for our slaughter of our own progeny by opening the doors to others? Are we just possibly ignorant in the same way so many German people claimed they were, because we really do not want to know?
Self-genocide
Proverbs 24:10-12 calls us to “deliver those who are being drawn down to death,” and asks, “If we say, we do not know, does not He who weighs the hearts know?” 2003 was the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. As mentioned earlier, when Roe was handed down, attorney Harriet Pilpel, a leading abortion advocate, commented, “More than we expected or even wanted.” Later she never agreed to even the slightest modification of abortion liberty, arguing that even the most modest restriction was just a foot in the door leading to total prohibition. If we say, we do not know, does He not know?
The population of the United States appears to have topped 300 million in 2006. A very substantial number of these millions are from what we call illegal immigrants, not admitted, not recorded, only present among us. How many are they? Fifteen million, twenty million, thirty million? Apparently we do not know. And at the same time there have been, more or less recorded, nearly 50 million abortions of what would have been American-born citizens. Has some hidden authority made a decision to replace American-born babies with illegal wanderers, with uninvited immigrants?
Uninvited? Is that true, or have we again fallen for mentiras? Do those who surge across our borders, often carried at great expense and danger by smugglers, encounter only hostile employers who wish to have nothing to do with them, or do they encounter willing hosts who appreciate their strong backs and zealous labor?
The majority of these “immigrants” are males, but many are women. The women bear children, who then, automatically, by our traditional droit du sol, right of the soil, become citizens, just as valid as the legal immigrants who arrived legally, have been here five years, answered questions, and sworn allegiance. And the new baby citizens can help make their parent, or parents, legal.
Illegal? It is the custom of our new language, ordained by Erich Fromm’s anonymous authorities, to omit that pejorative word and simply to call them all “immigrants.” When did we forget the fact that so many entered the country illegally? Does legality mean nothing to us? Perhaps not, for they are only swimming, driving, walking, and running, not coming by airline. We welcome them. Can it be that we do it because, consciously or not, we know that we need them to replace the unborn children that we so often “terminate”?
Deliver those
Throughout the whole thirty-three years that have passed since Roe, it seems that the majority of people have remained unaware of the fact that abortion is legal up to live birth. When I described this procedure to a German friend, a lawyer, he said, “That can’t be true!” “Are you accusing me of lying, Heinz?” I replied. “No, of course not, but it can’t be true.” Heinz, being a nominal member of the state church and thinking me a member of the so-called religious right, always gave me credit for gross exaggeration. Unfortunately, it is not an exaggeration. Most Americans seem to be aware of this method of “termination,” but do not think much about it.
American abortion law seems inconceivably cruel to most Europeans, even the most liberal. They find it as hard to believe about us as many Germans used to about the Nazi extermination camps. More than once our courts, even the highest, have explicitly affirmed the right to kill right up to birth. This will probably come under consideration again, and one can hope for a change, but so far it has not happened.
The god business
When I went to Germany in 1953, only eight years after the end of World War II, the one German who admitted having believed in Hitler was Pastor Otto Rodenberg, already mentioned. “Many of our theologians,” he told me, “have great difficulty believing in a personal God. They realize that if they admit such a God, they will have to concede that it is He who struck us.”
A very large majority of Americans profess to believe in God. Does it occur to them, as the grimace at atrocities like 9/11 and wrestle with the progress of the war in Iraq, that if God smote the Germans for murdering the Jews, He may just possibly be angry with us for weeding out our unborn children, one out of four, and sometimes one out of three. He does not appear to be blessing our Iraq war.
Widespread degeneration
One of the earliest academic books on the history of abortion was written by Raffaelo Balestrini in about 1840, Abortion, Infanticide, and the Exposure of Infants in Antiquity (in Italian). I no longer have access to Balestrini’s work, but I remember that he said something like this: “Abortion, when extensively practiced, is the symbol of a widespread social degeneracy. It can be met only with very far-reaching expedients.” How is it possible that ordinary Americans do not sense the social consequences of nearly fifty million abortions? We should be less censorious of the gullibility and complicity of the German people in Hitler’s mass exterminations if we glimpse the degree of American ignorance and complicity in our own terminations, “safely and legally,” as President Clinton used to put it.
In a 1985 front-page op-ed piece in the large French newspaper Figaro, “The Melt-down of Marriage,” demographer Pierre Chaunu said, “At the beginning of the century, Europeans were generally abstinent until marriage, and after marrying, had children. Today they cohabit without marrying, use contraception, and remain childless.”
The reliability and availability of contraceptive means has been growing in the United States and Europe since World War II. The introduction of oral contraceptives in the 1960’s virtually eradicated the fear of pregnancy as a barrier to non-marital sex. Sexual licentiousness spread rapidly over the western world over the countries that were or had been largely Christian. One might think that with contraception so readily available, there would be almost no unwanted pregnancies, and so virtually no demand for abortion. But when the contraceptives fail, or when they were not used, there is always abortion. As AIDS is the price that society must pay for homosexual promiscuity,[4] abortion is the price that it must pay for heterosexual promiscuity. For an adult woman to ask for an abortion is itself an admission of irresponsibility. For a male to put her in such a situation is equally bad.
A society that allows abortion on demand is a society that no longer recognizes the dignity of human life. It then becomes natural enough to legalize euthanasia, and, ultimately, involuntary euthanasia. When human beings do not care for our own dignity, they are rejecting God who created us. More and more American schools are required to teach naturalistic evolution in a way that excludes the thought of design, of the Creator. Being committed as we now are to absolute abortion liberty, do we feel it necessary to exclude the thought of the Creator, lest we begin to worry about His judgment?
The simplest thing to do against abortion, which is eating away at the American population, is to begin telling the truth, and getting our leaders both to tell it and to face it. No diga mentiras, diga la verdad.
Endnotes:
1 The abortion technique called “partial birth” partially extracts the baby, as though it were being delivered, and then evacuates the contents of its brain and takes the dead baby the rest of the way out.
2 According to the Jewish and Protestant numbering. The Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Lutherans list it as VIII.
3 The lie is very thoroughly reported by Joseph Dellapenna in Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History, Carolina Academic Press, 2006. This 1,300-page work was unavailable to me at the time of writing, but it is very thoroughly reviewed by Christopher Tollesen in Touchstone, January-February 2006, pp. 51ff. Many of the errors, as well as some of the criticisms, were already reported by me, among others, in my 1977 work Death Before Birth, Thomas Nelson, Inc.
4 “AIDS is not a homosexual disease,” we are told. True enough, it is a viral disease. The part of the truth that is not shared is that it in the West it is primarily transmitted through direct or second-hand homosexual contacts
