The Philosophy and Tactics of Abortionthink
                                (Edited)

                Right to Life-Lifespan Meeting - 1/15/90
                     Dearborn Free Methodist Church



                            Partial Contents


Religious freedom as a basis for abortion rights - opposition tactics
Alternate approaches - abortion advocacy as a religion
                     - Orwellian aspects of abortion advocacy
                     - abortion principles compared to doctrines of war
The Big Lie, confusion and illogic in Roe v. Wade
Biological basis for life before birth
Biological phenomena as religious criteria
Doublethink of abortion advocates
Abortionthink and the devaluation of human life
Neutralization of conscience
Purpose and value of law
The rise of Abortionite Klansmen
Abortionspeak, the language of denial
                     - potential life, viability, babyectomy, medical care
Determining the value of human life
Quotations in defense of abortion rights as religious freedom
Philosophy undergirding abortion rights - the philosophy of oppression
Orwellian manipulation of the minds of abortion defenders
Abortion as a human rights issue
Human sacrifice not protected by the First Amendment
Our abortion culture - cultural pollution of abortionthink
Interpretation of events by the pro-abortion media - news dialysis
Abortionmongers and bogus feminism - toxic shame of ersatz feminists
The Pro-Life Movement as the real women's movement
The lies of the abortionmongers as classical Orwellian reality control
The violence of the abortionmongers
The Pro-Life Movement as the real women's movement, the peace movement, 
the human rights movement and the cultural environmental movement combined




     What I want to deal with this evening are the arguments for the 
right to abortion that are based on claims of religious freedom.  I'm 
going to deal with this topic in the larger context of philosophy.  I 
want to deal with this because I believe that these arguments are the 
ones that have caused the most confusion among the most people and are 
most responsible for the reluctance to act against abortion by law even 
though most people believe that abortion is wrong.

     As Americans, I think we are reluctant to impose rules on all of 
society that may violate the religious values of some of us, especially 
so if the issues are not especially clear.  There are basically two 
concepts or questions at issue.  First, when does the biological 
existence of a new human being begin, often phrased as when does life 
begin, which isn't quite the same question, and second, when or by what 
criteria does a human life take on value or personhood such that it 
must be respected and protected by human society.  Those who oppose us 
on the grounds of religious freedom strike at the very heart of our 
position which consists of first, the certainty that each individual 
human life begins biologically at conception based on all the 
scientific evidence, and second, the ethical position that all human 
life must be protected at every stage of its natural existence.  They 
attack our position in basically three ways.  First, by claiming that 
when life begins isn't a strictly biological, scientific question.  
Second, that even if it is, science doesn't provide a clear answer and 
thirdly, that even if there is a clear scientific answer the real 
question pertains to the value of life which is properly within the 
realm of religion.  And that since religions disagree on the value of 
life before birth the right to abortion must be respected as a matter 
of religious freedom.

     The last point, that is, the value of life not being agreed on, is 
probably the most difficult but I'm going to deal with all three.  I 
considered two alternative approaches to this subject this evening and 
I'm going to incorporate elements of both, especially the second.  The 
first alternative was to show that the principles supporting free 
access to abortion constituted the establishment of a new state 
religion replacing the old, unofficial state religion which embodied 
the ethic of the sanctity of human life.  Had I pursued that I would 
have called the new religion "abortionism," the adherents of it 
"abortionites" and the principles of it would have been dogmas, the 
practices it justified "sacraments", and so forth.  The methods of 
promotion would have been "evangelical techniques".  That was one way I 
might have gone about this.

     The second approach, and again I'm going to incorporate somewhat 


more of this, would have been to show that the principles supporting 
abortion are identical to those of Orwell's totalitarian party in the 
novel 1984, which saw power as an end and not a means.  The party had 
three slogans which incorporated the principles of doublethink, 
principles of conscious contradiction.  The slogans were:  "War is 
Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", and "Ignorance is Strength".  Had I 
pursued that I would have tried to show that all three of these slogans 
could be shown to be the slogans of our opponents.  One of the points 
of that approach would have been to show that the current practice of 
abortion is very much a war on the unborn and bears some very striking 
similarities to the doctrines and strategies of war as they currently 
exist, and in fact exceeds them in brutality and inhumanity in a number 
of ways.  In addition, the current practice of abortion violates the 
laws of war if you make certain analogies between the unborn child and 
prisoners of war, and in any case that it is a human being.  If you 
don't accept the analogy the whole thing breaks down, obviously, and 
might not play that well with people who don't see that.

     The point of that would have been to show that the pro-life 
movement is very much a peace movement in trying to put an end to this 
war on the unborn.  But to our opponents, war is peace in this 
particular war.

     Now let me get to the first of the three attacks on our position.  
Some of our opponents claim that when life begins is a theological 
question not a biological or scientific question.  In my opinion, this 
is basically an instance of the Big Lie technique, which is to say that 
if you tell a lie often enough and with enough conviction it takes on a 
semblance of the truth.  It's a very effective technique.  
Psychological research has shown that if you put a subject in a room 
with a lot of people who are "in on it" and will deny the facts, the 
data, of their own senses, you can get the person who is the test 
subject to deny the data of his own senses as well.  The purpose of the 
Big Lie technique, in this particular instance to claim that when life 
begins is a theological question, is simply to introduce doubt through 
constant repetition.  Enough doubt to produce inaction on this 
particular issue.  One of the primary tactics of our opponents is to 
introduce confusion on the issue.  Nowhere is this confusion more 
evident than in the Supreme Court decision itself where the Justices 
wrote the following:

Justice Blackmun:  "We need not resolve the difficult question of when 
life begins.  When those trained in the respective disciplines of 
medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any 
consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's 
knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer."

     There are any number of comments that could be made on that 
particular passage, such as, we could ask why the justices did not see 
a need to resolve that critical question and why a consensus was 
necessary which is seldom required by the court to render its decisions 
on difficult questions.  And in addition, there was a consensus among 
the scientific authorities, I should mention.  But the point I want to 
focus on is the point of confusion.  By giving equal standing for 
medicine, philosophy and theology to answer a basically scientific 


question, they were able to evade the key question altogether.  And 
thereby evaded acknowledging that they had struck down the ethic of 
sanctity of human life for life before birth because according to their 
analysis they weren't dealing with life in the first place.
     The best argument I ever heard for life beginning at any time 
after conception, went something like this.  It said why not use the 
same criterion for when life begins as when it ends.  Since we are 
beginning to accept the cessation of brain waves as a criterion of 
death, why not use the onset of brain waves as a criterion for the 
beginning of life?  Well, there is a problem with that.  It used to be 
that we accepted the loss of a heartbeat as a criterion for death 
because we couldn't get that back--it wasn't reversible.  When that no 
longer was true, when we had the technology to restart the heart, that 
was no longer a suitable criterion for death.  Likewise, the reason 
that brain wave loss has become a useful criterion for death is not 
that the brain waves reflect in any way upon our humanity, our being 
higher than animals in our brain functions, or something like that, 
it's that it's an irreversible loss with current technology.  The brain 
waves will be irreversibly present once conception has occurred and so 
it can be said that conception marks the beginning of irreversible 
life.  So, the onset of brainwaves does not follow as a criterion of 
when life should begin.

     If there is any question on any of this, I'll be glad go into 
greater detail during the question and answer period.

     What if there were a religion in our midst that said that life 
begins at puberty?  I'm posing this question for a reason.  The 
reasoning behind this would go something like this.  It would say that 
life is present only when all the necessary functions for any living 
thing to be considered to exist are present, including the capability 
to reproduce.  By this type of reasoning pre-pubescent children would 
not be alive and presumably could be destroyed at will.  So I would 
ask, would freedom of religion protect this particular theology?  I'm 
going to phrase that question in a little broader terms and ask, are we 
obliged to accept and tolerate any and all ideas and the practices they 
justify, simply because they are presented to us as religious beliefs?  
Well, I don't believe we are, and in fact we don't.  Our courts have 
consistently ordered such things as medical care for children of 
parents who don't believe in that based on their religious beliefs.  
The belief that puberty would be an indication of the onset of life has 
no more basis in the biological facts than beliefs that life begins at 
any other time other than conception.  All the essential life 
processes, reproduction in particular, need not be present at any given 
stage of a species' life cycle for life to be present.  To claim that 
puberty, birth, onset of brain waves or heartbeat, capability to breath 
air, or anything else other than conception marks the beginning of an 
individual human life is to take a scientifically observable phenomenon 
and use it as a religious criterion based on faith and faith alone.  
There is as much scientific basis for religious beliefs that individual 
human lives begin anytime other than conception as there is to believe 
that the earth is at the center of the universe with other celestial 
bodies revolving around it.  In other words, there's none at all.

     I want to move on to the second attack on our position that 


science doesn't provide a clear answer to the question, assuming that 
it is conceded that it is a scientific question.  Here again we have 
confusion of the issue.  Our opponents argue, for example (and there 
are a number of ways that they would confuse this), that life is a 
continuum.  The sperm and egg cells are life also, so you can't say 
when life begins because it's always present.  Well, first we have to 
rephrase the question.  The question is when does each individual of 
our species have its beginning.  Gametes are not individuals, they are 
isolated cells, and their destiny is only death if they do not fuse in 
the fertilization event.  They do not proceed through the life cycle of 
our species.  They do not generate new forms, including other gametes.  
We can lose cells from our bodies in any number of ways which may 
remain alive apart from our bodies for some period of time.  But these 
are not reproductive events.

     Only when the full human genotype is reconstituted at conception 
or fertilization with the immediate onset of the process of cell 
division, cell differentiation, and subsequent growth, can a new 
individual be said to exist.  And that is why it is an accepted 
scientific fact that members of any species which reproduces by sexual 
means have their beginning at fertilization.

     I want to move on to the third attack, and again I think it is 
probably the most difficult, especially for me since I'm hardly a 
theologian or anything of that nature.  This is the question about the 
value of life.  I first want to deal with the concept of doublethink as 
it is set forth in Orwell's 1984.  It's a fairly complex concept but he 
defined it succinctly with these words:  "Doublethink means the power 
of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and 
accepting both of them."  Doublethink is evident in the abortion issue 
in a number of ways.  First, there are the two approaches to the 
unborn.  We have the unborn as the patient on whose behalf heroic 
efforts may be made and we have the unborn as the non-entity that may 
be disposed of at will.  All that makes the difference is whether you 
want it or not.

     The second way doublethink is evident is seen especially in the 
literature of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights or RCAR, some 
of which I have here, in which they claim to believe in the ethic of 
sanctity of life, but also believe in the conditional value of some 
life, in particular life before birth.  Well, if the value of life is 
conditional then there is no sanctity of life.  But they are able to 
hold these two contradictory ideas at the same time.  That's 
doublethink.  In addition, in their literature we see the existence of 
life before birth alternately acknowledged and denied.  Sometimes they 
write about it quite clearly and seem to understand it and then they'll 
lapse into such language as the phrase "potential life" which is 
absolutely meaningless.

     So what is abortionthink?  Well, this is a term I've coined.  It 
may not be original.  Abortionthink is doublethink with respect to the 
question of the value of life.  But I use the term also to refer to the 
rationalizing process of arriving at the second contradictory belief.  
Abortionthink is the mental process of devaluing the life of another 
sufficiently to justify destroying that life with little or no


remorse.  
In this sense it can also be applied after birth and in fact has been 
throughout history.  It has been a key to waging war and committing 
atrocities of every kind, even individual criminal acts.  Dostoevski 
showed us abortionthink at work in his novel, Crime_and_Punishment, 
wherein the protagonist went through a contorted thought process in 
which he equated the life of his intended victim with that of a louse, 
a nuisance insect.  Having done so he was able to go ahead and commit 
murder.

     If you can deny personhood, the value of life, you can do anything 
to your target.  You can turn the inhabitants of the Holy Land, for 
example, into the infidel in order to destroy them and possess their 
land; you can turn the American Indians into savages for the same 
reason; you can turn the minorities of Europe into subhuman forms of 
life and march them into gas chambers and ovens; or you can turn the 
unborn babies of the nation into non-persons and destroy them for 
whatever reasons you may have.

     Our opponents seem to be willing to go to any lengths to deny the 
personhood of the unborn.  They have even resisted attempts to require 
anesthesia for the child to be aborted even in the second trimester 
when it definitely feels pain.  They do this because to acknowledge the 
capacity to feel pain would be to acknowledge the personhood and 
humanity of the unborn child and thereby expose the operating 
pro-abortion lie.  It would be to expose the contradiction of 
abortionthink.

     Our opponents claim that we must respect the right to abortion as 
a matter of respecting individual conscience.  Well, in my opinion, 
abortionthink short- circuits conscience.  Conscience is effectively 
removed from the picture if abortionthink has run its course.  If 
unborn human life has little or no value, its destruction is just 
another choice among many.  Once the rationalizing process of 
abortionthink has been carried far enough by individuals or even whole 
nations, virtually anything can be justified and accomplished in good 
conscience.  The operators of Buchenwald and Auschwitz could be said to 
have conscientiously gone about their duties of racially purifying 
Europe.  They could do this because in their minds their victims did 
not exist as human beings.  Through abortionthink, the prohibition 
against taking human life had been rendered meaningless and conscience 
had ceased to function.

     I think this is why we need ideals and standards such as the 
embodiment in the law of the ethic of the sanctity of human life.  We 
need an image of what a just and compassionate society ought to look 
like if we ever hope to even move in that direction.  The great tragedy 
of the abortion decisions of the Supreme Court is that they cut the 
nation off from its moral moorings in the ethic of the sanctity of 
human life such that we are now adrift on a dangerous moral sea.

     I want to make a couple of comments with respect to the 
Constitution since there has been so much said the last couple of years 
with it's 200th anniversary.  I want to say that our Constitution has 
not lasted 200 years because it is written down on paper or even 
because of what it says.  It has been copied many times with much less 


satisfactory results in other nations.  Our Constitution has lasted 
200 years because it is written in the hearts of Americans such that we 
will live it and defend it unlike any other people on earth.  The only 
law that really matters is the law that is written in our hearts.  And 
it is this law that abortionthink has been rewriting.  The law has a 
teaching function and ultimately, we enforce the law on ourselves.  We 
have taught our young people that abortion is acceptable because it is 
legal.  We have taught a generation that it's ok to deny the most basic 
of human rights to the unborn and to other classes of helpless human 
beings.  The denial will therefore continue long after abortion is once 
again prohibited.  Just as slavery was the root cause of many of 
today's problems, more than a century after abolition, abortion will be 
the cause of tomorrow's.  There will be Abortionite Klansmen who will 
violate the rights of the unborn because they have been taught it is 
their right.

     I want to digress for a few minutes on the subject of language.  
If you've been in Right to Life for any length of time, you're familiar 
with some of the more blatant distortions of language that the other 
side engages in, such as that most repulsive of modern euphemisms, 
"pro-choice", and among others, "pregnancy tissue", "products of 
conception" and so forth.  I could say, for example, that you're a fine 
looking group of products of conception here tonight since we all are 
that.

     I want to talk about a couple of the more subtle problems with 
language.  For example, you're all familiar with the expression "to 
have a child".  It's usually mentioned to imply a future event--the 
birth of a child.  But all of us really know that a woman really has a 
child long before birth.  It's these innocent anachronisms of language 
that are a real problem for us, I think.  We can't even talk about this 
subject without communicating in language that is a problem.

     Our opposition has deliberately exploited these quirks of our 
language and fashioned a lexicon of lies that I call abortionspeak.  It 
is a dialect of Orwell's newspeak, a language of denial and confusion.  
It's based on the same principle to a large extent:  that it is 
impossible to think an heretical thought without the vocabulary in 
which to think it.  Let's take for example the phrase I mentioned 
earlier, "potential life."  Potential refers to something that could 
happen if certain conditions are met.  Well after conception a new 
individual life certainly exists.  It is something that is happening.  
The conditions have been met.  And while it's true that the word 
potential can be used in another sense, to say for example that a 
zygote is a potential infant just as an infant is a potential adult, 
with only the passage of time being required in the normal course of 
events for that to take place, it is still something that will happen, 
not that could happen.  There is nothing potential about life in the 
earliest stages of the life cycle of any species.  An organism is alive 
at every stage of its life even if it is not recognizable as the same 
individual or even the same species as it proceeds through the various 
stages.  Some examples that might be familiar to all of us would be the 
tadpole and the frog, the caterpillar and the butterfly, and the 
aquatic nymph and the adult of the dragonfly.



     Many creatures such as those I just mentioned even change 
environments during this process.  Who would argue that a tadpole is 
not a living creature because it cannot survive in the same environment 
as the adult of its kind?  Have you ever heard an argument that it has 
not achieved full froghood yet?  Then there is the concept of 
viability, which I think has been very misleading as it has been used 
in the abortion debate.  Even our own people make claims such as that 
viability is a function of technology.  Well I don't agree.  I claim 
that viability is a function of environment, which technology may 
affect.  My point is this:  the unborn baby is perfectly viable in the 
interior of its mother's womb, which is the only environment in which 
it is adapted to live at the early stages of our species' life cycle.  
The word viable means able to live.  To say that an unborn baby is not 
viable is to imply that it is not alive.  It is to communicate in 
abortionspeak, the language of denial, the language of the Big Lie.  We 
would do better to speak of intrauterine and extrauterine viability or 
the intrauterine viable child.  Even the word abortion is a euphemism 
and part of the vocabulary of abortionspeak.  It has been noted, for 
example, that both the doctor and the mother when they're going through 
the pre-natal care stage refer to the unborn child as the baby when 
they want to keep it.  But can you imagine for a minute what the debate 
on this issue would be like if the correct and accepted term for what 
we call abortion were "babyectomy"?  "I'm going into the hospital to 
have my baby removed".  I think it would be a completely different 
situation.

     Abortion is not medical care.  It should not be referred to as 
such.  Medical care heals unhealthy conditions.  An abortion destroys a 
human life.  It is pre-natal human vivisection.  Abortions are not 
"performed" as we are accustomed to saying.  They are committed.  We're 
not talking about tonsillectomies.  We're talking about the shredding 
of tiny human beings.  Abortions are not morally inconsequential 
surgery but temporarily legal crimes against humanity due to an act of 
tyranny by the United States Supreme Court.  Like slavery before it in 
this country, or apartheid today in South Africa, abortion is a legal 
crime and should be spoken of in terms that reflect the truth.  To do 
less is to communicate in abortionspeak, the language of denial.

     To return to the subject now of determining the value of life, I 
want to report a summary of one of the RCAR (Religious Coalition for 
Abortion Rights) authors of his position in his pamphlet, A_Theological_
Response_To_Fundamentalism_on_the_Abortion_Issue.  It says this: "At 
stake in the political struggle is no less than the type of society we 
understand ourselves to be.  Are we an oppressive society that denies 
the personal rights of women or a society that respects and protects 
various religious, moral, and personal points of view?"  Well, I agree 
with the first part of that, what is at stake is the type of society we 
understand ourselves to be.  But I would continue this way.  The rules 
by which we value human life determine the kind of society we will have 
and the kind of people we ourselves will be.  The killing of other 
human beings is always of concern to the entire community.  Whether 
it's by military activity, penal activity, police activity, criminal 
activity, or the pseudomedical activity we call abortion.  In every 
case there is investigation into the circumstances in which human life 
is taken to determine whether or not it is justified, with one glaring 


exception that must be corrected.

     Ask yourself for a moment, what determines the value of your own 
life or anyone else's life?  Is it related in some way to your size or 
appearance or your income or potential for productivity?  How about 
your intelligence or the state of your health?  Is the value of your 
life related to your responsibilities or your self-awareness or perhaps 
your relationships with others?  If you think about this for a while I 
think and I hope you will come to the conclusion that there's only one 
characteristic that determines your right to life because it is the 
only quality that all of us share on an exactly equal basis.  And that 
is the quality of simply being alive.  As such, it is the only basis 
for conditioning a right to life because we are different in every 
other way.  To use any other quality as a criterion for a right to life 
means that someone, somewhere, sometime is going to come up short on 
the yardstick.  I think the founders of this country understood this 
when they described the right to life as an inalienable right.  The 
term means not transferrable.  It comes with the territory.  It is part 
and parcel of being a living human being.

     Let's examine now some of the principles and definitions of 
personhood that our opponents think we should respect as matters of 
religious freedom.  I'm going to quote here from a pamphlet, 
Personhood,_the_Bible_and_the_Abortion_Debate.  "The genetic 
definition of personhood confuses potentialities with actualities.  
Potentialities are certainly important but they do not have the same 
value as actualities."  Then he quotes another author, "An embryo is 
not a person but the possibility or the probability of there being a 
person many months or even years in the future."  These comments are 
confused on several points.  I mentioned the word potential earlier.  
The genetic definition that he refers to is part, not all, of the 
definition of when an individual human life begins.  It is not the 
definition of personhood.  It is true that it is assumed by Right to 
Life that personhood, that is the value of life, comes with life.  That 
is, we are endowed by our Creator with our inalienable right to life 
from the time we are created.  The definition of life, however, 
includes the start of the growth and development process.  The RCAR 
definition of person rests, as you have seen already and will continue 
to see in the next few quotes, on already present capacities and 
abilities.  I quote here again from the same pamphlet, "A person or 
human being has capacities of reflective choice, relational responses, 
social experience, moral perception, and self-awareness.  Both the 
person and the zygote have 'life' and both are 'human' since they 
belong to homo sapiens.  But a zygote or blastocyst do not fully embody 
the qualities that pertain to personhood.  A great deal more complex 
development and growth are necessary before the attributes of 'person' 
are acquired."  A little farther on in that pamphlet, "To be a person 
is to be a choice maker, reflecting God's own ability to distinguish 
good from evil, right from wrong."  And again, a little beyond that, 
"The Biblical portrait of person, therefore is that of a complex 
many-sided creature with God-like abilities and the moral 
responsibility to make choices.  The fetus hardly meets those 
characteristics."  And again just beyond that, "The one who 
unquestionably fits this portrayal", that is of person, "is the woman 
or mother in question.  Because the pregnancy is hers, so the decision 


is uniquely hers".  Note here the dehumanizing usage of the word 
pregnancy and the reduction of life before birth to property.  These 
definitions may be fine for distinguishing humans from other animals 
when we're talking about healthy adults but what are their implications 
for the very young, even those already born, or adults with certain 
physical or mental disabilities?  And finally, our RCAR author says 
this about wanted or unwanted pregnancies, "The essential difference is 
the value of the fetus to those involved in the pregnancy.  It is not 
vitality but the acceptance, affirmation, recognition, and love of the 
fetus that grants personhood and assures that it will become a person."  
And so we see in this quote that the value of life is extrinsic, that 
it is granted by others, by those who have power, based on qualities 
they choose to recognize.

     So what is this philosophy that we are being asked to respect 
under the guise of religious freedom?  It is the philosophy of 
oppression, the philosophy of totalitarian states, the philosophy by 
which fundamental human rights have always been denied.  It is might 
makes right.  It is divine right of kings revisited.  Only the source 
of sovereign power has changed from the monarch to the individual.  But 
it is no less a claim of divinely ordained rights to control the lives 
of other human beings even unto death.

     The incredible hubris it takes to pre-judge an entire human 
lifetime based on anticipation of difficult circumstances at birth, 
itself usually months away, is perfectly consistent with the philosophy 
of divine right of abortionites.  Under this philosophy, the source of 
fundamental human rights has reverted to the discretion of others.  It 
is regressive, historically rejected, and repudiated philosophy.  It is 
philosophy that has been found to be incompatible with societies 
dedicated to the protection of inalienable human rights.  It is 
philosophy that is alien to our national heritage and purpose and 
philosophy that must be rejected as dangerous and destructive.  Given 
the history of its application in this country in recent years, with 
some 25 million American children having already been destroyed by 
legal abortion and the nearly immediate extension of the philosophy to 
include infanticide and the reinvigoration of the euthanasia movement, 
it is philosophy we can no longer and never could afford to accept.  
Let us not delude ourselves, this philosophy is not restricted to 
applications to life before birth.  It is a philosophy of control, a 
philosophy of power.

     In the afterword to Orwell's 1984, Erich Fromm says this, "In a 
successful manipulation of the mind, the person is no longer saying the 
opposite of what he thinks but he thinks the opposite of what is true."  
Our opponents truly believe that they are defending basic American 
freedoms when they are in fact defending the destruction of the most 
basic freedom of all, the freedom to continue to live.  And also 
defending the destruction of the very basis of our national commitment 
to human rights.  They can do this because through abortionthink, in 
their minds the victims do not exist.

     If there is to be any resolution of this issue I believe it will 
depend in large measure on how the issue is framed and what questions 
are asked.  Shall the issue be framed in terms of "who lives" or as 


presidential candidate Michael Dukakis framed it, "who decides"?  Let 
us ask, does human society have a right to protect its own or are we 
obliged to respect religious beliefs that justify the destruction of 
human life regardless of how flagrantly they fly in the face of the 
scientific facts and the time tested values of Western civilization?  
Let us ask, are human beings personal property at any time in their 
natural existence, property that can be disposed of at will, or are 
they part of the human community from the start?  And let us ask, do 
those who have the power to oppress others have the right to do so by 
virtue of simply denying the equivalent humanity of those others as has 
been done throughout history by abortionthink?

     Viewed from the perspective of social and political philosophy, 
abortion is not a religious issue but a human rights issue.  But 
abortion is a religious practice.  It is living human sacrifice to the 
idols this society has come to worship.  Only the idols have changed 
from those in ages past.  In ancient times they were carved of stone.  
In Germany in more recent times they were racial purity and utility.  
In America today the idols that we worship are money, power, image, 
sex, convenience, human intellect, physical and mental perfection.  
These are the reasons that most abortions are committed in this 
country.

     The human sacrifice of today is not protected by the First 
Amendment any more than it would be after birth.  And for society to be 
required to tolerate the obviously intolerable is a painful and morally 
crippling form of cruel and unusual punishment.  This is not true for 
all of us, of course.  It is especially not true in the opinion shaping 
institutions of this country where acceptance of abortion is regarded 
as somehow sophisticated, modern, and intellectually enlightened.  We 
have come to live in an abortion culture in which it is taken for 
granted by many that abortion is the way we are going to go.  Abortion 
is subtley promoted in countless ways all around us.  Ending a 
pregnancy is spoken of casually, just as easily as pulling a plug on 
someone.  One of my co-workers even referred to the process by which we 
"commission a child".  We are immersed in abortionthink.  We even 
communicate an abortionspeak ourselves.  How did our cultural 
environment get so thoroughly polluted?  Well, it has been due to a 
deliberate strategy carefully orchestrated over many years which saw 
the enthusiastic cooperation of the national information media.  Some 
of the most recent examples are the election results from this last 
November in which the media assumed in advance that abortion is a 
losing issue for a pro-life candidate and interpreted events 
accordingly.  The Virginia gubernatorial election provides an excellent 
example in which the Democratic candidate, who was pro-abortion and 
happened to be black, was pitted against a Republican candidate, who 
was pro-life and white.  The Republican candidate was lagging behind by 
some 10 percentage points in the polls going up to election day.  In 
the election, the result was nearly dead even.  I remember watching the 
news that night and the anchorman asked the correspondent why the polls 
were so horribly wrong.  They didn't call it very well at all.  The 
correspondent went into an instant news dialysis, as I recall, about 
the unexpected result.  It had to be racial.  This was the reason for 
the sudden upsurge in the standing of the Republican candidate.  He 
went through a history of Virginia as the capital of the Confederacy, 


mentioned recent busing problems and so forth.  It was not possible 
in the minds of the people covering the story for the abortion issue to 
have helped the Republican candidate.  But in fact, this was the case.  
It was simply a matter of too little and too late.  Virtually the 
entire ten percentage point difference that was made up was due to the 
Republican candidate finally fighting back in the last week or so of 
the campaign.

     You're going to hear a consistent message from the media as we go 
along in the elections this year that opposition to abortion is a 
losing position.  The message, in case you haven't gotten it by now is 
that contributions to strong pro-life candidates are a waste of money.  
Don't bother.  Abortion is a freedom whose time has come.  Give up.  
Your cause is hopeless, even reactionary.  You can also be expected to 
hear continued references to such things as America's pro-choice 
majority.  It is essential to successful use of the Big Lie to keep 
repeating these mantras.

     The force behind the strategy to promote abortion was initially a 
small group of people who saw the abortion issue as strictly a power 
issue.  For them, life before birth had no significance at all.  And 
for them I reserve the term "abortionmongers".  They are today found in 
many places, but particularly in the leadership of the so-called 
women's movement.  And I say so-called because the original, genuine 
feminists opposed abortion, seeing it is exploitation of women and 
evasion of male responsibilities.  The original feminists insisted that 
the male-dominated society change to meet the real and different needs 
of women, whereas today's so-called feminists say that women must 
change to meet the demands of the male dominated society.  They must 
become the killers of their own children in order to make it in the 
world.  Today's bogus feminists despise womanhood and regard the 
procreative function of women as a defect to be overcome in an attempt 
to be like the desirable sex, the sex that has power.  It is a totally 
negative and degrading view of women.  The ersatz feminists of the 
so-called women's movement are seriously afflicted with what 
psychologist John Bradshaw calls toxic shame:  the belief that women 
are seriously flawed and inadequate.

     The abortionmongers angrily claim that abortion is a women's 
issue.  They try to exclude everyone else but women, even all but 
child-bearing women--women of child-bearing age, from having anything 
to say about it.  That's been an effective ploy in intimidating many 
into silence.  Its senselessness, however, makes perfect sense with 
abortionthink, wherein the victim does not exist.  Similarly one might 
claim, I suppose, that apartheid is an Afrikaaner's issue, slavery was 
a slave owner's issue, the Nazi holocaust was a German issue, and so 
on.  The list of such foolishness could go on indefinitely.  The Right 
to Life movement, however, is very much a women's movement.  I'd like 
to show this.  I'm not sure this is a large enough sample to show this 
but I've yet to attend a pro-life meeting of any kind in which the men 
outnumber the women.  I'd like to ask the members of Lifespan to stand 
up for a minute, of those who are here tonight.  This is a small sample 
but I'm going to tell you from my own experience - I'm not counting 
people - but what I wanted you to notice was the relative numbers of 
women and men here.  I'd say it looks about even but typically there's 


usually a few more women.  I want you to know that, first of all, the 
people who just stood up are my heroes.  I want to say that based on my 
experience, in every Right to Life meeting of every kind, whether it's 
a membership meeting, such as this one, a board meeting, a rally, or a 
planning session - the women have outnumbered the men.  In fact, the 
ratio is even more lopsided in the other half of the movement which 
runs the crisis pregnancy centers that offer women real, life-affirming 
choices.  My point in this is to say that the pro-life movement is the 
real women's movement in a number of ways - in terms of our view of 
women, in terms of what we offer women as well as in terms of the 
composition of our membership.  The myth that the Right to Life 
movement consists of men trying to control women is one of several of 
what John Noonan calls the "legends of the abortion liberty", in his 
book, A_Private_Choice.  I call these "legends" lies.  They are a 
series of deliberate fabrications, attempts to re-write history and 
distort language, fact and principle in every conceivable way to cast 
abortion in a favorable light.  For more detail I have to refer you to 
Noonan's book.  I'm going to go through this rather quickly.  Perhaps 
the most pernicious and effective lie that they came up with was the 
deliberate campaign to portray opposition to abortion as Catholic 
theology being forced upon the nation.  There was a deliberate appeal 
to existing bigotry and it saw the active and enthusiastic cooperation 
of the national media over a period of many years.  It is quite likely 
that this lie is the one that is still most responsible for our 
reluctance to restrict abortion by law.  It is clear from some of the 
early RCAR literature that the authors believed this lie, at least 
until other abortion opponents became more vocal.  How all this 
Catholic theology got into the nation's abortion laws in the first 
place, they never explain.  Presumably they believed still another lie, 
the lie that the nation's abortion laws were enacted to protect women.  
The last time I heard this particular lie was in the TV movie, Roe_
versus_Wade, in which the actress portraying the lawyer who brought the 
case before the Supreme Court was engaged in an argument with a 
pro-life opponent who was an older and bald male - all we pro-life 
people are old, bald men, in case you didn't notice in that movie - and 
she blurted out that the nation's abortion laws had been enacted to 
protect women.  Of course, there was no response to that.  As a result, 
that lie became truth to millions of people who watched that movie.  It 
wasn't even a very good lie, but then, it doesn't have to be.  It needs 
only to sow doubt, for the purpose of it is to undermine public 
understanding of precedent, original intent and tradition.  It is an 
example of classical Orwellian reality control.  The pertinent 
quotation from Orwell's 1984, is another party slogan which went like 
this:  "Who controls the past controls the future.  Who controls the 
present controls the past".  It is a process of making lies become 
truth.  And it has also been applied to the history of Christian church 
attitudes on abortion.  By their substantial control of the present 
through their allies in the national media, the abortionmongers can 
control public understanding of the past.  And they hope thereby to 
control the future.  They have done so with great effect so far.  We 
could cite other lies such as the statistics on abortion which were 
total fabrications with regard to maternal deaths when abortion was 
still illegal.  And that's been acknowledged by a former insider in the 
National Abortion Rights Action League, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who 
wrote this book, Aborting_America.  But that lie is still useful even 


though it has been acknowledged to have been a lie.  We still hear 
claims that if we outlaw abortion again we're going to go back to the 
days of the back-alley and only the butchers will be doing them and so 
forth.  The fact is that abortion is safer today for the women involved 
due to a change in the technology of abortion, not because of its 
legality.  The abortionmongers have shown no reluctance to invent 
statistics to suit their needs.  

     I'm going to start to wrap this up here.  In Orwell's 1984 there 
were four ministries of government.  The Ministry of Peace-which dealt 
with war, the Ministry of Truth-which dealt with lies and reality 
control, the Ministry of Plenty, which dealt with starvation, and the 
Ministry of Love, which concerned itself with torture.  The names of 
these ministries were deliberate exercises in doublethink.  Consider 
America of 1990, in which government, which exists according to our 
national ideals to secure our inalienable right to life, has become the 
guarantor of its destruction; in which medicine, which is supposed to 
heal illness, has prostituted itself to become the agent of death; and 
in which ethics, which is entrusted with delineating standards of 
behavior, has become the black art of justifying the unconscionable.  
We have indeed come a long way--the wrong way.  We have come this far, 
this fast, because the abortionmongers have done violence to the fabric 
of our culture in every possible respect.  They have done violence to 
the truth in re-writing the history of the laws of abortion and church 
attitudes, in fabricating statistics and confusing the biology of the 
matter.  They have done violence to language, violence to values, and 
violence to the principles of human rights.  They have done violence to 
the law in fabricating a right to abortion which exists nowhere in the 
Constitution or anywhere else in American law.  They have done violence 
to medicine, turning it into a cult of death.  And they do violence on 
a continuing basis, every single day over 4,000 times, to the most 
vulnerable members of the human community.  The abortionmongers have 
been violent to the core from start to finish.  Yet when the public 
thinks of violence on this issue, it thinks of the handful of the 
abortionmongers' fellow anarchists who have bombed some of the nation's 
abortuaries.  The manipulation of the national consciousness through 
the tactics of abortionthink has been nothing short of masterful.
  
     To conclude, I want to first read a quotation from a pro-life 
activist who was asked why he wanted so much to do pro-life work.  He 
said this, "Abortion is antithetical to everything I believe.  It rests 
on despair, lies, and terrible ignorance.  It destroys love.  It 
violates women.  It betrays the dependent child and brutally abuses the 
most vulnerable of all.  It subverts medicine, law and government.  It 
is applied atheism.  How could I not do pro-life work?"

     If you remained seated earlier and you're not already involved in 
pro-life work of some kind (and I suspect that most of you are, though) 
you might want to ask yourself that same question:  "how could I not do 
pro-life work?"  And if you are so inclined, you are invited to join us 
this evening, to join the real women's movement, the peace movement, 
the human rights movement, and the cultural environmental movement all 
rolled into one.  We call it the Right to Life movement or, more 
simply, the Pro-Life movement, and we need you.  Your country needs 
you.  And above all, the generations yet to come, who may still have a 
chance, need you very badly.  Please don't let this opportunity pass 
you by.  Thank you for hearing me this evening.