Post-Roe America: ever since Roe v. Wade first struck at the right to life, America has been sliding down a slippery slope toward infanticide, euthanasia, and the "duty to die". (Cover Story: Abortion).

The very first time her mother met me, her green-eyed girl had been a mother-to-be for two weeks;

I was out of a job and she was in school, life was fast and the world was cruel, we were young and wild--we decided not to have a child.

So we did what we did and we tried to forget, and we swore up and down there'd be no regrets in the morning light....

From "Red Ragtop" by country artist Tim McGraw

Shortly after the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, radical activist Lawrence Lader recalled: "Only seven years ago when my book, Abortion, raised the first nationwide demand to make this procedure a Constitutional right, many TV and radio stations hesitated to debate the subject, or even mention the word." The word also remained unspoken in the 1972 film A Place in the Sun, in which a jilted pregnant woman played by Shelley Winters sought to abort a child conceived through an extramarital affair. Left-wing television propagandist Norman Lear can claim the dubious distinction of being first to use the term "abortion" in prime time, during a two-part episode of the sitcom Maude in 1972.

A generation ago, abortion was a subject confined to the dingiest periphery of American society, and even the most self-consciously "progressive" activists uttered the word reluctantly. Today, abortion is part of the warp and weave of popular culture, an experience so commonplace that it can serve as the subject of a chart-topping country and western song. It's difficult to find a better illustration of the way that the abortion revolution has reconfigured mainstream American society.

Tim McGraw, a multi-platinum-selling country artist in his mid-30s, describes his single "Red Ragtop" as a song "about real issues and things people have to deal with ... truly a slice of life." "The song reminds people of their lives, and that's what country is supposed to do," commented Dave Kelly of the Nashville radio powerhouse WKDF-FM in an interview with the Dallas Star-Telegram. "You wouldn't believe the amount of calls saying, 'That's my life--it reminds me of my ex-boyfriend.' Or their ex-girlfriend. People really relate to different aspects of the song."

Interestingly, the song--in which a man reflects on a failed teenage love affair--obliquely refers to abortion only once. It also contains the line: "You do what you do, and you pay for your sins...." The result is a studied ambiguity worthy of a focus group-tested political speech. "I think anyone who is against abortion will see the line, 'you pay for your sins,' as being against abortion," observed Becky Brenner, program director for a country music station in Seattle. "Anyone who is pro-abortion feels like the song supports the 'you have a choice' aspect of the controversy."

But this analysis misses a crucial point: The song's narrator fails to focus on what happened to the aborted child--the innocent party who actually paid for the young couple's sins. The song's story line treats the abortion as something that happened to the couple, rather than as a lethal act of violence ending a human life.

It bears repeating that the song under discussion is an example of country music, the soundtrack of middle-class, "Red Zone" America--church-going people generally conservative in their politics and moral outlook. As one station manager pointed out to Billboard magazine, the country audience typically doesn't "worry about their kids being exposed to what they would consider dangerous content." And with relatively few complaints, the country music audience made McGraw's melancholy paean to the "pro-choice" ethic a top-10 smash.

Lethal Lies

Thirty years ago, most Americans regarded abortion as an unspeakable crime; today, it is considered a legitimate "option," one that is exercised roughly 1.5 million times a year. Since 1973, America's abortion mills have slaughtered nearly 42,000,000 babies. If allowed to live, the human beings destroyed through abortion would constitute a population roughly that of Spain. And it's impossible to calculate what has been lost in terms of human achievements--in science, literature, music, art, and other worthy pursuits--because scores of millions of lives were violently ended before birth.

Abortion on demand, the public is told, is the "law of the land." But this is entirely untrue. Congress never passed any law authorizing the summary slaughter of "unwanted" infants. Before January 22, 1973, most states had statutes that either criminalized abortion or subjected it to various restrictions. Those laws were mowed down by the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, in which the court ruled that a developing human infant was only "potential" life--thereby making an entire class of human beings subject to the lethal whims of others.

In 1962, as the American Law Institute (ALT) debated a model statute intended to guide "reform" of state abortion laws, attorney Eugene Quay summarized the constitutional case against abortion: "The state cannot give the authority to perform an abortion because it does not have the authority itself. Those lives are human lives, and are not the property of the state." Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun ironically confirmed that assessment when he wrote the majority opinion for Roe. That opinion is notable for both the expansiveness of its claims and the utter lack of relevant citations from statutes and previous judicial decisions. It was, as Blackmun's colleague Byron White protested, an act of "raw judicial power"--a judicial coup in which a rogue court imposed a new "order of priorities on the people and legislatures of the states."

But Roe did not suddenly emerge from a flat and featureless social landscape; it resulted from a carefully orchestrated long-term effort by social revolutionaries like the above-cited Lawrence Lader and other members of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL, now called the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League). * At its founding meeting in 1969, NARAL determined that it "would settle for nothing less than striking down all existing abortion statutes and substituting abortion on demand." Blackmun's obliging majority opinion in Roe included seven citations from Lader's book Abortion and seven more from NARAL's legal counsel.

Even before Roe, NARAL and its allies understood that public opinion had to be manipulated to sustain a nationwide legalization of abortion. NARAL founding member Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who underwent a change of heart and became a leading pro-life voice, explains that the abortion revolutionaries' key tactical victory was to persuade the media "that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal, enlightened, sophisticated one. Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60% of Americans were in favor of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority."

Another effective NARAL propaganda tactic was "to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. [before Roe]. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure we constantly fed to the media was 10,000.... These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law."

The prestige press eagerly devoured NARAL's misinformation and dutifully regurgitated it to the public, creating the enduring myth of a pre-Roe "back-alley" bloodletting. As pro-abortion author Marian Faux noted in her 1988 book Roe vs. Wade, the truth is that "illegal abortion was not as dangerous as it had been depicted" --as far as the woman was concerned, of course. According to Faux, "women have probably been better off in the hands of competent but 'illegal' abortionists ... than with the family doctor who did one abortion a year." Nonetheless, she continued, "an image of tens of thousands of women being maimed or killed each year was so persuasive a piece of propaganda that the [pro-abortion] movement could be forgiven its failure to double-check the facts." But as Nathanson testifies, NARAL's misrepresentations were conscious lies, rather than the product of inattention or sloppy research.

Downward, Ever Downward

Even prior to Roe, pro-life commentators warned that legalizing abortion would initiate our society's slide down a slippery slope, and that abortion on demand would beget such horrors as infanticide and euthanasia ("mercy killing" of elderly or the chronically infirm). While pro-abortion leaders publicly dismissed such warnings as alarmist, they privately acknowledged that Roe was intended to strike not only at laws protecting unborn human beings, but at the very foundation of the sanctity-of-life ethic.

"The U.S. Supreme Court decision of January 22, 1973 on abortion was a stunning document," exulted Lader in The Humanist. "Surely, this has been a humanitarian revolution of staggering dimensions. It went to the core of our most sensitive ethical and religious beliefs...."

Blackmun's decision described the developing human within the womb as "potential life." In an essay published in the London Times the same day Roe was handed down, Barbara Smoker, vice chairman of the British Humanist Association, used a similar phrase to describe newborn children. According to Smoker, "the situation of a newborn baby is very different from that of the same baby, even a few weeks later.... At birth the baby is only a potential human being and at that point it is surely the humane and sensible thing that the life of any baby with obvious severe defects, whether of body or brain, should be quietly snuffed out by the doctor or midwife." (Emphasis added.)

In the May 1973 issue of AMA Prism, published just weeks after Roe, James Watson--the man who cracked the genetic code--similarly urged extending Roe's denial of "personhood" from the unborn to infants born with birth defects. Watson contended that newborns should not be regarded as "alive" until three days after birth, to give parents the option of killing imperfect children. "If a child were not declared alive until three days after birth ... the doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering."

Dr. Joseph Fletcher, creator of the insidious doctrine of "situational ethics," similarly argued for infanticide in a 1982 interview. "It is absolutely imperative that society put an emphasis on the quality of life, rather than the sanctity of life," he insisted. "There is no doubt that the general trend in ethical thought is to terminate the lives of defective newborns.... [I]f such a child had a demonstrably low IQ or had severe physical disabilities, then its life should be mercifully ended." Killing unwanted newborns, according to Fletcher, wasn't murder but rather "postnatal abortion."

A few weeks after Fletcher's interview saw print, medical authorities in Bloomington, Indiana, allowed a six-day-old child to starve to death after refusing to perform surgery to correct an esophageal defect. Born with Down's Syndrome, the child didn't make the "quality of life" cut.

During the mid-1990s, controversy arose over the practice of "partial-birth" abortion. This is actually a form of infanticide in which a baby is delivered, except for the head; the child's skull is then pierced and his brains are vacuumed out, after which the skull is crushed and removed from the womb. While Congress and state legislatures debated measures intended to outlaw the practice, and the pro-abortion movement angrily defended it as a vital component of "a woman's right to choose," a string of media reports described incidents in which teenage mothers killed their newborn infants by suffocating them, by discarding them in toilets, or through other means.

The kinship between partial-birth abortion and nonclinical infanticide was highlighted by the 1996 case of Brian Peterson and Amy Grossberg. This teenage couple from Delaware delivered their baby in a motel room, killed the child, and discarded the tiny body in a dumpster. ("Get rid of it!" the new mother reportedly told her boyfriend after her baby was born.) The National Right to Life Committee noted that "at a single abortion clinic in Englewood, New Jersey--only a few miles away from the homes of the young couple in question--doctors acknowledged that they perform over 1,500 partial-birth abortions a year."

For killing her own newborn child, Grossberg served two and a half years in prison. Had she acquired the proper medical credentials and found employment at the local abortuary, Grossberg could have made a very handsome living killing the children of strangers.

According to Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cases like that of Amy Grossberg illustrate the supposed need to legalize "neonaticide." "Full personhood is often not automatically granted at birth," wrote Pinker in the November 2, 1998 New York Times Magazine. "To a biologist, birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other [in recognizing personhood].... Several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons, and thus neonaticide should not be classified as murder.... So how do you provide grounds for outlawing neonaticide? The facts don't make it easy."

Though Pinker's observation is appalling from a moral perspective, his reasoning is a sound application of Roe's lethal logic.

A "Duty to Die"?

Although hailed by proabortion advocates as a victory for "freedom of choice," the Roe decision actually prefigured the emergence of the "duty to die" concept.

The salient concept in Roe is not personal autonomy; instead, it is the conceit that the state (in this case, the Supreme Court) can grant the right to life. As elaborated by humanist thinkers such as Pinker, Fletcher, et al., this concept should serve a eugenic purpose by allowing society to "weed out" humans who would not enjoy a proper "quality of life." This concept--that "life unworthy of life" should be disposed of quickly and humanely-was tidily expressed decades ago by Nazi medical authority Dr. Arthur Guett, who declared, "It is the supreme duty of the state to grant life ... only to the healthy and hereditarily sound portion of the population.... The life of the individual has meaning only in light of that ultimate aim."

The "quality of life" ethic has seeped into our increasingly collectivized health care system, resulting in cases of clinical infanticide and attempted infanticide that carry grim portents for our future. In 1993, two premature children born thousands of miles apart--Ryan Ngyuen in Spokane, Washington, and "Baby Terry" in Flint, Michigan--were found by medical authorities to be "life unworthy of life."

Ryan's kidneys were malfunctioning, and his physicians initially refused to continue dialysis, telling his father: "The time has come for your baby to die." When Ryan's father went to court, seeking an injunction to continue treatment, hospital officials filed a complaint with Child Protective Services (CPS), seeking to remove the newborn from his parents' custody; they accused the parents of "physical abuse" for trying to preserve their son's life. Ryan's parents were able to transfer their son to another hospital, and after finishing dialysis he went on to live a brief--but happy--life with his family.

"Baby Terry" was born at 23 weeks' gestation with serious brain damage. Though the child was gaining weight and fighting off a bacterial infection, hospital administrators ruled that continued care was "futile" and terminated treatment. When the child's young parents refused to cooperate, the administrators called in the Michigan Department of Social Services, which brought legal action to strip the parents of custodial rights. A probate judge complied with that demand, awarding temporary custody of the infant to a maternal great-aunt who had expressed willingness to cut off the child's life support. Before a final decision about custody was reached, the child, aged two and a half months, died in his mother's arms.

One episode of this sort is an anomaly; two may be considered a coincidence; but three or more constitute a pattern. The case of William Reid Goforth, recently described in these pages (see "Goforth in Faith" in our December 16, 2002 issue), is uncannily like those of Ryan Ngyuen and "Baby Terry." Born nearly three months premature to a young married couple, William was given no chance of survival by his doctors. William's father Joshua was told that letting his child live would be an "unacceptable outcome." Like the parents of Ryan Ngyuen and "Baby Terry," Joshua and Noelle Goforth's refusal to allow their child to die provoked hospital administrators into seeking CPS intervention. Thankfully, William continued to grow and enjoy improved health, and the family--which had rejected government welfare subsidies--was able to raise sufficient funds to pay almost all of the medical bills.

The Death Ethic

The Goforth family's experience is a ray of hope piercing a curtain of dark clouds on our cultural horizon. In his book Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America, Wesley J. Smith of the Discovery Institute soberly takes note of the extent to which the practice of discretionary killing has become commonplace in post-Roe America:

Twenty years ago... it would have been unthinkable to dehydrate people to death by removing their feeding tubes because they were cognitively disabled. It might even have been criminal. Today, due in large part to vigorous advocacy by bioethicists, which in turn has led to court cases and then to new laws permitting the practice, it is routine in nursing homes and hospitals throughout the country. Fifteen years ago, legalized assisted suicide was virtually unthinkable in the United States and Canada. Today, thanks in large part to advocacy by bioethicists, it is deemed justifiable, not only in Oregon where it is now sanctioned by law, but ... elsewhere in the country.

Bioethicists, according to Smith, are the "new high priests" of a medical ideology that "focuses on the relationship between medicine, health, and society. This last element allows bioethics to espouse values 'higher' than the well-being of the individual and to perform the philosophical equivalent of triage.... Instead of embracing the human community--which means all of us-they worry instead about the 'moral community' which in theory and often in practice excludes some of us."

It was Roe's exclusion of pre-born children from the human community that placed our society on the downward slope described by Smith. It's at once fascinating and terrifying to ponder this question: Thirty years hence, what now-unthinkable practices might find their way into chart-topping country ballads?

* For information about the conspiratorial origins behind what became the abortion movement, see "The Roe Revolution" from the January 17, 2000 issue of TNA. Links to this and other TNA articles on abortion are available at: www.thenewamerican.com/focus/abortion/