This may feel like déjà vu. The Senate has passed a ban on partial birth abortion before but Bill Clinton was president and vetoed it twice. Now that both the Senate and the House can pass it, and the president has asked for it, it should be relatively smooth sailing. This is an issue that gets beyond the usual abortion-debate divide: Even stalwart defenders of "choice" have realized that partial-birth abortion is infanticide.
In my own profession of journalism it is common enough to deride economists as practitioners of the "dismal science." Yet in most cases it is the economists who have maintained faith in human ingenuity and initiative and who have rejected counsels of despair and control. The majority of them have never been found on the front lines of the movement for population control.
Previously, because euthanasia was prohibited in the Penal Code, the physician had to prove that he/she had fulfilled the requirements. Under the new arrangements, the Public Prosecutor has to prove that the physician has not fulfilled the requirements, in order to start prosecution. This is a significant shift.
Orestes Brownson is not, at first sight, a philosopher of liberty. He was, to put it paradoxically, more attentive to the many ways in which freedom goes wrong than in the ways in which it goes right. Or, to put it another way, liberty never just "goes right" by itself. It is the truth that makes us free, not the freedom that makes the truth.
Conscience for St. Thomas More was the right to be right, not the right to be wrong.
We have all heard it said that the war on terrorism pits liberal democracy against religious fanaticism. There is a measure of truth in that. Others say the conflict is between a secular understanding of society and a society defined by religiously based morality. That, I suggest, is both untrue and dangerous.
In the thirty years since "Roe v. Wade", science and technology have continued their forward march. Ultrasound has advanced from the grainy black and white shadows of yesteryear to movies in living color. Little wonder that obstetricians are increasingly reluctant to perform abortions. Who, after all, could consider a fetus as life unworthy of living, once they've held its hand?
In looking back over the enormous changes wrought by the twentieth century, Western observers may have missed the most dramatic revolution of all.
Two hundred years ago this New Year's Day, Thomas Jefferson penned a letter to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut in which he said the First Amendment built "a wall of separation between church and state."
The manipulation of language has long been one of the hallmarks of the pro-choice position. But with ultrasound, words no longer matter so much: The abstract melts into the concrete and the personal. This powerful emotional appeal will continue to grow as 3-D ultrasound enters the mainstream.
