In the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby: "There is nothing more dangerous than a man with only one idea." Little did Fitzgerald realize then how prophetic his statement would prove to be. For less than a decade later, Adolf Hitler began promulgating his single idea of the master race -- an idea that not only ignited World War II but also fueled the gas chambers that killed six million Jews.
At just about the time Fitzgerald was first penning his words, the pioneer of abortion rights, Margaret Sanger, was calling on American women to "look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look ... No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body." Sanger's words became the rallying cry of a movement that has ever since made a woman's right to abortion the single most important issue in Democratic Party politics.
Since the U. S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, more than 54 million abortions have been performed in the United States. (The more precise number provided in January 2012 by the National Right to Life Committee is 54,559,615.)
Popular magazines like Time have repeatedly tried to spin this continuing 'slaughter of the innocents' by citing recent declines in the abortion rate. The fact remains, however, that "twenty-two percent of all U.S. pregnancies end in abortion."
Public television has also tried to suppress these grim statistics by changing the subject, as when PBS guest columnist Charmaine Yoest claimed: "In recent years, momentum on behalf of protecting innocent human life has never been stronger, evidenced by the fact that states now routinely pass large numbers of new pro-life laws annually." Ms. Yoest is not talking about protecting the "innocent human life" of an unborn baby, however. She's talking only about protecting the ignorance of any young mother who thinks her only alternative is to kill her baby.
Yoest even tries to dismiss the notorious Kermit Gosnell as nothing more than a careless practitioner: "The Gosnell situation is not unique," she claims. "Over the last three years, at least 15 states have initiated investigations into abortion clinics and individual abortion providers for providing substandard patient care -- poor care that, in some cases, has resulted in women's deaths." Note again, how careful Yoest is to avoid mentioning babies' deaths.
In the precise language of understatement, Carol Brown has already exposed the core of this issue on AT: "...there are clearly standards, protocols and values in the medical community about informed consent which are not upheld at the same level in the abortion industry."
Yet, with heartrending candor, she has also recounted her own experience: "...I never reflected on the actions I took that day in any deep or meaningful way until I began my journey from left to right. Along the way, I have taken a deep and hard look at abortion and have reached what now seems a glaringly obvious conclusion: Abortion is wrong. Worse than wrong."
Why then do so many Americans still seem to believe a woman's right to abortion trumps all other rights -- including, presumably, everybody else's right to life? According to an April 2012 Pew opinion survey, 54 percent of the general population still thinks abortion should be legal. Among third-generation Hispanic Americans, the statistic is the same.
As for African-Americans, a January 2013 Pew survey revealed that "only 53 percent of Black Protestants say it's morally wrong to have an abortion."
According to the Guttmacher Institute, however, the incidence of unintended pregnancies among African-American women is 69 percent and the incidence of abortions is 37 percent. These figures are higher than those of any other racial demographic -- a fact that leads many to allege de facto genocide.
During the 1960s, civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Ralph David Abernathy strongly opposed abortion. Yet, their purported disciples Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson have pledged complete fealty to the pro-abortion cause. Then there's our first African-American POTUS and FLOTUS, both strong supporters of abortion rights. What can these people be thinking?
Don't they realize Margaret Sanger was a proponent of abortion primarily because she was a rabid racist and eugenicist? Had this woman been born a decade later, she would have been as much of a propagandist for the Master Race as Leni Riefenstahl. Consider these words Sanger wrote: "The mass of Negroes, particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among Whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit ... The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the Minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."
There are, of course, many courageous African-Americans such as Howard University's Rev. John J. Raphael and Rev. Dr. Clenard Childress, pastor of New Calvary Baptist Deliverance (Montclair, NJ) who have been prominent leaders in the pro-life movement.
All across the political spectrum, though, few seem to understand that our obsession with abortion is not, after all, about race or religion, gender or genetics, power or politics. What it's really about is fear of the consequences of our own irresponsible behavior -- fear of poverty, sickness, and homelessness; fear of the rising tide of other human beings multiplying and pouring across our borders.
The message from the left in all of this is clear -- only we who are now alive, healthy, wealthy, and under sixty-five have a "right to life." Our generation is the be-all and end-all of evolution. The legalization of human cloning and euthanasia for the aging are only the logical next steps in this mad quest for immortality on earth.
Let's not kid ourselves. God is not finished with the universe yet. Our generation, our nation -- our species even -- is not the be-all and end-all of God's creative plan. Even if you're a hard-core atheist, you cannot ignore the scientific fact that the history of the human species, timewise, is only a tiny fraction of the history of all life forms on this planet. And what about the life forms on other planets in other solar systems and other galaxies?
Tonight, after dark, step outside and look up at the stars in the sky. Ask yourself as you contemplate the vast reaches of the firmament, "Am I the most important creature in this universe? Is my body and my power to control it all that matters?"
Clearly, there really is nothing more dangerous or absurd than a man or a woman with only one idea.
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