52 years ago, seven out of nine robed men in Washington, D.C. banged the gavel and declared a death sentence upon what would turn out to be 65 million (and counting) human beings in America. I refer to the infamous Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court of January 22, 1973. And they twisted plain language to usher in this death sentence.
Although it was finally overturned in the Dobbs v. Jackson decision of 2022, the nation still bears the scars of this Supreme Court decision which gave us abortion on demand.
What’s fascinating about this unresolved debate about abortion is the abuse of language in order to hide the grisly reality of the deliberate killing of preborn babies.
On Friday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis braved the cold, as did tens of thousands of other Americans, to attend the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. He made a fascinating point about language and the abortion issue.
The governor referred to an article in The New York Times (which has been staunchly in favor of abortion rights) with a headline: “Undocumented women ask, will my unborn child be a citizen?”
Said DeSantis after citing the headline: “So, The New York Times is admitting it’s not just a clump of cells. Let’s welcome The New York Times to the pro-life movement. Wow.”
The pro-abortion movement deploys language that dehumanizes the unborn, minimizing the harsh reality of abortion. Thus, the preborn babies are referred to as just a….
– “product of conception”
– “clump of cells”
– “fetus” ---yet this is just Latin for unborn child.
Think about even the term “pro-choice.” As someone once said, “What do you choose when you’re pro-choice?” “Pro-choice” means being pro-abortion. No other choice. I’m for choices, but not for abortion.
The Christian satire site Babylon Bee recently showed how absurd it is to reduce an unborn baby to merely “a clump of cells.” Cecile Richards, the longtime former president of Planned Parenthood, died last week. Planned Parenthood has been one of the foremost champions of this dehumanizing language.
The Bee’s headline was: “Clump Of Cells Dies At 67.” The satirical article began, “A clump of cells became no longer viable earlier this week at the age of 67. The clump, which had been birthed by Democrat uterus-owner and former Texas governor Ann Richards, was in its 205th trimester.”
Although this is absurd, for all practical purposes, Roe v. Wade ruled that the unborn child is not a person with 14th Amendment rights. The ruling stated: “If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.”
In 1970, a few years prior to the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, Dr. Malcom Watts wrote the most revealing editorial for the California Medical Association, entitled “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society.” Kudos to author Dr. William Brennan, retired professor of St. Louis University, for bringing this to light in his writings.
Watts was brutally and painfully honest: “The traditional Western ethic has always placed great emphasis on the intrinsic worth and equal value of every human life regardless of its stage or condition. This ethic has had the blessing of the Judeo-Christian heritage and has been the basis for most of our laws and much of our social policy.”
Watts added: “Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and it’s continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected.”
In contrast, the founders of America said in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are [the right to] life.”
But if there’s no Creator---if we are just the random product of time, matter, and chance, then why should there be a right to life for anyone? Governor DeSantis is right. We all know that what’s in the womb is not just a “clump of cells.” It is a growing, developing human being. And modern technology documents that---despite the denial of those who refuse to listen.