What they really want

The New York Times can be relied upon to tell us where liberals want to take the country---to tell us what they really want. In an editorial last Thursday, the Times said:

"[I]n a rational system of medical care, there would be virtually no restrictions on financing abortions. But abortion is not a rational issue."

Not rational? Medical science has known since 1857 that human life begins at conception. It was the medical profession---not the churches---that vigorously lobbied for protective laws against abortion in the 1850s and 1860s. Those laws upheld the highest form of rationality and morality. Those protective laws said simply: Innocent human life may not be directly attacked.

Another influential journal-maybe not as influential as The New York Times, but influential all the same-is California Medicine. Its editors told us in their pro-abortion editorial of 1970 why the Times is wrong to say opposition to abortion is not rational:

The traditional Western ethic has always placed great emphasis on the intrinsic worth and equal value of every human life regardless of its stage or condition. This ethic has had the blessing of the Judeo-Christian heritage and has been the basis for most of our laws and much of our social policy. The reverence for each and every human life has also been a keystone of Western medicine. . . . Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices.

The slaughter of innocents is unjust. It will not matter that it has the backing of the Supreme Court, the president, the Congress, or The New York Times.

Our opposition to liberal abortion is based on this fundamental truth, this self evident truth. This nation---of all nations---proclaimed the right to life as the first among rights, the first human right endowed by our Creator. Jefferson said it well: "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time."

Even if you do not believe in God---as apparently The New York Times does not---medical science has incontrovertibly told us when human life begins. "To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men," says the Declaration of Independence, including primarily the right to life.

Does The New York Times believe that the Declaration, too, is irrational? Do they think the United States should be adjourned?

Our opposition to abortion is as rational and as deeply ingrained as our opposition to slavery or to segregation. For centuries, slavery was "legal" in all too many parts of our country. Our Supreme Court, in an earlier act of "raw judicial power," affirmed slavery as a right of property and explicitly declared it constitutionally protected. That gross injustice brought the nation to the brink of dissolution. Lincoln used the words of Jesus to warn that "a house divided could not stand." Was Lincoln's opposition to the spread of this evil also irrational?

We hear that The New York Times has had to mortgage its headquarters, that this once-great newspaper is in financial peril. I do not want to see this American institution go under. But if it does die, the obituary for the powerful paper they call "the Gray Lady" will read: Suicide.