Everyone should be on Twitter that's how I found this article on thew national right to life website.
Today's News & Views
June 14, 2006
Reminders of Past Treacheries -- Part One of Two
When I first arrived at National Right to Life in late August 1981, my first order of business was to quickly put together the September issue. Once that mission was successfully completed, among the very first things I did was spent an awful lot of time going through the extensive files my predecessors had accumulated in the years since the paper began in 1973.
I remember like it was yesterday pulling out a musty file. One of the items I found tucked way carried that unmistakably pungent smell that xeroxed copies had in those days. Lo and behold I found what turned out to be a copy of an article Jesse Jackson had sent to be published in the January 1977 issue of National Right to Life News.
This all came rushing back to me when I read Nat Hentoff's column published in Monday's Washington Times. Its title says it all--"The devaluing of human life; Why did Jesse Jackson change his stance on abortion?"
Probably only grizzled pro-life veterans remember that Jackson was a powerfully passionate, dazzlingly articulate pro-lifer in those days. (I'm attaching the bulk of the 1977 article he wrote as Part Two.)
I remember the following passage as if I read it an hour ago:
"… I was born out of wedlock (and against the advice that my mother received from her doctor) and therefore abortion is a personal issue for me. From my perspective, human life is the highest good, the summum bonum. Human life itself is the highest human good and God is the supreme good because He is the giver of life. That is my philosophy. Everything I do proceeds from that religious and philosophical premise. "Life is the highest good and therefore you fight for life, using means consistent with that end. Life is the highest human good not on its own naturalistic merits, but because life is supernatural, a gift from God. Therefore, life is the highest human good because life is sacred."
His NRL News essay was no isolated incident. He wrote an "Open Letter to Congress" in which he said "as a matter of conscience I must oppose the use of federal funds for a policy of killing infants.'' Speaking at the 1977 March for Life, Jackson asked, ''What happens . . . to the moral fabric of a nation that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience.''
Hentoff begins his column with an incident that happened recently. A nine-year-old boy overheard his parents talking about abortion and asked, "What is an abortion?"
"His mother tried carefully to describe it in simple terms," Hentoff writes. "But," said her son, "that means killing the baby." The mother tries again, leading her son to believe there are time restraints (there aren't). "The 9-year-old shook his head," Hentoff writes. "'But,' he said, 'it doesn't matter what month. It still means killing the babies.'"
Pretty impressive: a nine-year-old who refused to be dissuaded by the usual justifications/rationalizations for abortion, even when they came from his mother, who performs abortions.
"The boy's spontaneous insistence on the primacy of life," Hentoff writes, "also reminded me of a powerful pro-life speaker and writer who, many years ago, helped me become a pro-lifer. He was a preacher, a black preacher." He was Jesse Jackson.
The latter third of Hentoff's column explains how abortion has paved the way for "other controversies involving euthanasia, assisted suicide and the 'futility doctrine' by certain hospital ethics committees." The middle section includes some informed speculation about why Jackson changed his mind--at least publicly. That transformation occurred in 1988 when Jackson decided to run for the presidency as a Democrat. Naturally, he was applauded by the media for his "growth."
Hentoff says the last time he saw Jackson was on a train years later.
"On that train, I also told Mr. Jackson that I'd been quoting in articles and in talks with various groups from his compelling pro-life statements. I asked him if he'd had any second thoughts on his reversal of those views.
"Usually quick to respond to any challenge that he is not consistent in his positions, Mr. Jackson paused, and seemed somewhat disquieted at my question. Then he said to me, 'I'll get back to you on that.' I still patiently await what he has to say."
Jackson is hardly the only politician ever to trade principle for promises of political gain. Two other candidates running for the Democratic Party's 1988 nomination had pro-life histories before they, too, jumped ship.
But Jackson's turnabout is particularly poignant, even startling. His critique of abortion is informed and in-depth, his comparisons of abortion to slavery scintillating, his own near-death (by abortion) experience an uncomfortable reminder that he could have been a statistic, and his challenge prophetic, rooted as it is in his role as a "minister of Jesus Christ."
Colman McCarthy was another liberal Democrat who embraced the cause of life. In 1988 he wrote a blistering column for the Washington Post denouncing Jackson.
"No other candidate this season, fallen or still standing, has shifted positions as radically as Jackson on abortion," he wrote. "If Jesse Jackson of the 1970s were to debate the Jesse Jackson of 1988 on abortion,"
McCarthy added, clearly infuriated, "the old would flatten the new and leave him mumbling pro-choice slogans."
McCarthy concluded by noting that "none of Jackson's six Democratic opponents made an issue of his desertions. Perhaps they saw him 'maturing,' which is said of Jackson's '88 campaign.
"A pro-abortion party can embrace Jackson, but it is getting a defective product," McCarthy wrote.
"Jackson has become the kind of politician he warned about a decade ago, one whose pro-abortion arguments 'take precedence over human value and human life.'''
Please read Part Two. If you have any comments or questions, please send them to Dave Andrusko at dandrusko@nrlc.org.
Part Two
oday's News & Views
June 14, 2006
"How We Respect Life is the Over-riding Moral Issue…" -- Part Two of two
By The Rev. Jesse Jackson
National Right to Life News, January 1977.
Part One
The question of "life" is The Question of the 20th century. Race and poverty are dimensions of the life question, but discussions about abortion have brought the issue into focus in a much sharper way.
How we will respect and understand the nature of life itself is the over-riding moral issue, not of the Black race, but of the human race.
The question of abortion confronts me in several different ways. First, although I do not profess to be a biologist, I have studied biology and know something about life from the point of view of the natural sciences. Second, I am a minister of the Gospel and, therefore, feel that abortion has a religious and moral dimension that I must consider. Third, I was born out of wedlock (and against the advice that my mother received from her doctor) and therefore abortion is a personal issue for me.
From my perspective, human life is the highest good, the summum bonum. Human life itself is the highest human good and God is the supreme good because He is the giver of life. That is my philosophy. Everything I do proceeds from that religious and philosophical premise. Life is the highest good and therefore you fight for life, using means consistent with that end.
Life is the highest human good not on its own naturalistic merits, but because life is supernatural, a gift from God. Therefore, life is the highest human good because life is sacred. …
Only the name has changed
In the abortion debate one of the crucial questions is when does life begin. Anything growing is living.
Therefore human life begins when the sperm and egg join and drop into the fallopian tube and the pulsation of life take place. From that point, life may be described differently (as an egg, embryo, fetus, baby, child, teenager, adult), but the essence is the same. The name has changed but the game remains the same.
Human beings cannot give or create life by themselves, it is really a gift from God. Therefore, one does not have the right to take away (through abortion) that which he does not have the ability to give. Some argue, suppose the woman does not want to have the baby. They say the very fact that she does not want the baby means that the psychological damage to the child is reason enough to abort the baby. I disagree. The solution to that problem is not to kill the innocent baby, but to deal with her values and her attitude toward life --that which has allowed her not to want the baby. Deal with the attitude that would allow her to take away that which she cannot give.
Some women argue that the man does not have the baby and will not be responsible for the baby after it is born, therefore it is all right to kill the baby. Again the logic is off. The premise is that the man is irresponsible.
If that is the problem, then deal with making him responsible. Deal with what you are dealing with, not with the weak, innocent and unprotected baby. The essence of Jesus' message dealt with this very problem -- the problem of the inner attitude and motivation of a person. "If in your heart . . ." was his central message. The actual abortion (effect) is merely the logical conclusion of a prior attitude (cause) that one has toward life itself. Deal with the cause not merely the effect when abortion is the issue.
Pleasure, pain and suffering
Some of the most dangerous arguments for abortion stem from popular judgments about life's ultimate meaning, but the logical conclusion of their position is never pursued. Some people may, unconsciously, operate their lives as if pleasure is life's highest good, and pain and suffering man's greatest enemy. That position, if followed to its logical conclusion, means that that which prohibits pleasure should be done away with by whatever means are necessary. By the same rationale, whatever means are necessary should be used to prevent suffering and pain.
My position is not to negate pleasure nor elevate suffering, but merely to argue against their being elevated to an ultimate end of life. Because if they are so elevated, anything, including murder and genocide, can be carried out in their name. …
Psychiatrists, social workers and doctors often argue for abortion on the basis that the child will grow up mentally and emotionally scarred. But who of us is complete? If incompleteness were the criteria for taking life we would all be dead. If you can justify abortion on the basis of emotional incompleteness then your logic could also lead you to killing for other forms of incompleteness -- blindness, crippleness, old age.
Life is public and universal
There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of higher order than the right to life. I do not share that view. I believe that life is not private, but rather it is public and universal.
If one accepts the position that life is private, and therefore you have the right to do with it as you please, one must also accept the conclusion of that logic. That was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore outside of your right to concerned.
Another area that concerns me greatly, namely because I know how it has been used with regard to race, is the psycholinguistics involved in this whole issue of abortion. If something can be dehumanized through the rhetoric used to describe it, then the major battle has been won. ... Those advocates of taking life prior to birth do not call it killing or murder, they call it abortion. They further never talk about aborting a baby because that would imply something human. Rather they talk about aborting the fetus. Fetus sounds less than human and therefore can be justified.
In conclusion, even if one does take life by aborting the baby, as a minister of Jesus Christ I must also inform and/or remind you that there is a doctrine of forgiveness. The God I serve is a forgiving God. … What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person, and what kind of a society will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually?
It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind. Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth.
Makes you go HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM????