Pro-Life

Insisting on Life [Excerpts]

A longtime friend of mine is married to a doctor who also performs abortions. At the dinner table one recent evening, their 9-year-old son -- having heard a word whose meaning he didn't know -- asked, "What is an abortion?" His mother, choosing her words carefully, described the procedure in simple terms.

"But," said her son, "that means killing the baby." The mother then explained that there are certain months during which an abortion cannot be performed, with very few exceptions. The 9-year-old shook his head. "But," he said, "it doesn't matter what month. It still means killing the babies."

Hearing the story, I wished it could be repeated to the justices of the Supreme Court, in the hope that at least five of them might act on this 9-year-old's clarity of thought and vision.

I [once] attended a conference on euthanasia at Clark College in Worcester, Mass. There, I met Derek Humphry, the founder of the Hemlock Society, and already known internationally as a key proponent of the "death with dignity" movement.

He told me that for some years in this country, he had considerable difficulty getting his views about assisted suicide and, as he sees it, compassionate euthanasia into the American press.

"But then," Humphry told me, "a wonderful thing happened. It opened all the doors for me."

"What was that wonderful thing?" I asked.

"Roe v. Wade," he answered.

The devaluing of human life -- as the 9-year-old at the dinner table put it more vividly -- did not end with making abortion legal, and therefore, to some people, moral. The word "baby" does not appear in Roe v. Wade -- let alone the word "killing."

And so, the termination of "lives not worth living" goes on.

(http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/hentoff1.asp)