40 Sorrowful Years

I sent this in to the Asheville Citizen-Times yesterday.
It should come out on the 21st or 22nd.

Guest Editorial by Meredith Eugene Hunt

40 years represents a mere turning of a clock—the earth moving around the sun.

      Time magazine’s January 14th cover story proclaimed, “Abortion-rights activists won an epic victory in Roe v. Wade. They've been losing ever since.”  This statement is wrong on the only scale that matters. 40 years after Roe, prenatal children are still being aborted “legally” in our country. 

      While abortion seems entrenched into our culture, in the realm of reasoned argument, the abortion-choice movement has lost the game entirely.  With the advances in observing the life of children in the womb, the work to educate university students on the true nature of abortion, and the logical arguments that demonstrate the humanity and personhood even of an embryo, abortion-choice rhetoric shows itself to be empty.  It’s strong on absurdities, non sequiturs, false history, and demonizing characterizations of pro-lifers.  If you add to our intellectual victory the network of non-profit agencies that serve women in a crisis pregnancy and confirm the compassionate heart of pro-life ideas, the defeat of the abortion choice “position” is total.

      The problems is, legal abortion isn’t dependent on sound jurisprudence or moral reasoning.  It never was.  “Pro-choice” efforts in those directions have been no more than gauze over the power to kill.  They’re an illusion to make the terrible seem less terrible—to comfort people so they can do what they want, and to mislead the desperate. 

      If so, then only a power in the opposing direction can counteract it.  I mean the power to save.  Am I talking about violence?  No.   We are entering an era for artists who communicate when people become deaf to reason, and martyrs who give themselves to saving the lives of others.

      We saw a shadow of the power to save in the Rescue Movement in the early 90’s when 34,000 people were arrested for peacefully blocking doors of abortion centers.  I see some hope now from young people who are impatient.  They’re behind personhood amendments in various states and they understand the principles of rescue, of intervening in a way that validates their belief that each abortion takes the life of a child. 

      On January 11 this year the Alabama Supreme Court recognized that “unborn children are persons with rights that should be protected by law.”  This ruling sets up yet another conflict between powers, one that someday will explode when a state refuses to back down, and instead decides to actually protect all people within its jurisdiction.

      Meanwhile, at a minimum, we need to maintain a prayerful witness outside the places where prenatal children are aborted, the same as we should if born children were being killed under the forceful shelter of government.