WASHINGTON — Abortion is un-American. It baldly violates the
first principles of the country, cracking the foundation on which
all rights for Americans rest — the right to life. Unless the
right to life is inviolable, none of the rights that presuppose it
are inviolable either. The Founding Fathers could not have imagined
that the most perilous place in America would end up being a
mother’s womb.
The Washington Post on Sunday noted that President Bush has been reading Natan
Sharansky’s book,
The Case for Democracy. Sharansky establishes in the book
a “townsquare” test for democracy: it exists if citizens can
protest the government in a townsquare without interference. A fine
test, but I would propose a more fundamental one: democracy exists
if you can be born into it without an attempt on your life.
Monday’s March for Life served as a reminder that for all our
renewed rhetoric of freedom America, 32 years after Roe v.
Wade, continues to deny freedom to unborn babies. The fire of
freedom of which President Bush spoke last week still hasn’t
illuminated the shadows and penumbras under which more humans are
aborted each day in America than were killed on 9/11.
President Bush, in his remarks to the March for Life attendees
(piped in via phone from Camp David), used a word rarely heard
these days: civilization. The proof of civilization, he said, is
whether the strong protect the weak. By that standard, many
democracies don’t qualify as civilizations, including our own if it
betrays the principles of America’s founding.
As democratically elected savages like Adolf Hitler illustrate,
democracy is not an automatic guarantor of civilization. Separated
from moral truth contained in a rule of law, democracies can be as
tyrannical as the most rapacious undemocratic governments.
America should only be on the side of “democracy” if it produces
civilization; otherwise the tyranny America seeks to end will
spread through the very rhetoric of democracy it uses, should the
bin Ladens and Hitlers be democratically elected to power. The
Founding Fathers, it is worth remembering, didn’t call King George
III a tyrant because he was a monarch; they called him a tyrant
because he violated basic human rights. They knew democracy could
devour itself through its own tyrannies unless it was subject to a
truth higher than democracy itself.
A nation that kills its own children is a democracy without
civilization and a people without a future — literally. Not
surprisingly, pro-life events such as the March for Life are
popular with children, the survivors in the random lottery of life
Roe v. Wade conducts year by year.
Unlike the children dragooned into service at last year’s
pro-abortion “March for
Women’s Lives” on the national mall — those children looked
about as happy as tots at a casting call for The Omen —
the youth attendees at the March for Life braved the freezing
weather willingly to protest an obvious injustice against their
generation. Naturally, the mainstream press took little to no
interest in this largely youth event.
Most youth causes — particularly if they are infantile and
dangerous to the common weal — command the media’s most solicitous
attention. But if thousands of youth descend on Washington, D.C. in
biting weather to protest abortion, that’s a non-event. The
Washington Post barely mentioned the march, though it did
find a paragraph in its brief Metro story on Sunday to let a Planned
Parenthood official smear pro-lifers as “people who love fetuses
but hate babies and children.”
Would the Washington Post have published a pro-lifer
saying that Planned Parenthood hates fetuses, babies, and children?
They do. As Margaret Sanger’s son Alexander has put it, the unborn
child is a “liability, a threat, and a danger to the mother.” Child
abuse follows from abortion in principle, a fear children whose
siblings were aborted have confessed to psychologists. If they
could have done that to my brother or sister, why did I survive?
they wonder. And why couldn’t they do violence to me now?
This year’s March for Life featured among other politicians
Senator Sam Brownback (“Brownback in ‘O8” signs dotted the crowd),
Hoosier Rep. Mike Pence, and a slew of Kansas congressmen. The
insipid Main Street Republicanism of Nancy Kassebaum and Bob Dole
is now a dim memory — no wonder elite journalists are shrieking,
“What’s the matter with Kansas?” There were plenty of clergy too,
plus a new group of activists the mainstream media certainly won’t
cover — women who regret their abortions. Abortion is violence
against women, they testified, both for mother and child.
But violence against women and child abuse, normally topics of
lively interest to the press, are of zero interest to a
pro-abortion press corps that regards abortion as a glorious
“freedom” — perhaps the only one they demand Bush export to the
ends of the earth. What they don’t realize is that the pro-life
movement will succeed without their attention. If the country is to
survive and prosper, a practice as abhorrent to its founding
principles as abortion can’t.
