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The Lost
Generation: 31 Years of Roe v. Wade
By Hans
Zeiger
In a sad sort
of way, I am blessed to have survived the year 1985. That was the year I was
born, and the year that 1.6 million of my fellow American citizens were
murdered in abortion clinics.
1985 was the
year that more abortions were performed than in any other year before or
since except 1988 and 1990. Numbed by the widespread cultural acceptance of
abortion, I lack the emotional regrets that old soldiers have when they
reflect on their friends lost in battle. But the year I was born, abortion
claimed more of my peers than all of the deaths in all of America's wars
combined.
In the 31
years since January 22, 1973, abortion has become one of the most common
surgical procedures performed, and it is done in the safety and serenity of
modern, plush clinics operated by exceptionally profitable non-profits like
Planned Parenthood. Since Roe v. Wade, government social service agencies
have taken advantage of the legality of abortion to add it to the list of
public services provided to low-income citizens. Today, three of ten
abortions are taxpayer-funded. Since 1973, one in four pre-born children
have been numbered among the victims of the war against life.
If we accept
the obvious, the most recent World Almanac should have listed the leading
cause of death as "abortion."
I once heard
someone reflect on the terrible, hypothetical concept that certain great men
and women of America's past had never been born. Flip through a history book
and begin crossing out the names of the presidents, the pioneers, the
inventors, the writers, the scientists. Spread black ink over the
photographs and paintings and names of Washington and Jefferson, of Edison
and Ford, of Lincoln and Martin Luther King.
We have
witnessed a purge of horrific proportions within the past couple of
generations, and abortion's count in America alone is around 43 million. But
I don't suppose that young Americans, born in the past thirty years, have
taken much time to reflect on the idea that a great number of their
generation has already departed from this world. 43 million souls is quite a
significant number. But since they aren't really souls, as we're told, it
doesn't matter. They are fetuses; they are tissues; they are inconveniences.
We are better without them, say their killers.
Even if we
accept the humanitarian justifications of the burgeoning abortion industry,
that my late peers were mere fetuses that lacked any type of spiritual
dimension, there is no reasonable person who doubts that they were once
living human beings. The great national debate no longer questions the
definition of life, it questions whether there is any value in life at all.
Abortion
doctors and pro-choice activists know quite intimately the fact that
pre-born children are alive from conception. The contention of the
pro-abortion movement is that life has no intrinsic value, and if possible,
we ought to avoid it. Indeed, if the fetuses butchered around me in 1985
were simple organisms taken mercifully from this world to spare them from the hardships of life, and to make
the burden less stressful for society, we owe our prosperity and our low
poverty levels to the unborn generation.
But what if
my missing contemporaries were souls created by and in the image of an
Almighty God?
I reflected
on this question when I protested at the grand opening of a Planned
Parenthood teen clinic in my hometown a few weeks ago before returning to
college for the new semester. I watched as young people drove up to the
clinic and filled the parking lot to capacity. I have seen that the abortion
industry has done the necessary work to maintain itself for yet another
generation.
But can
America survive?
Can America
continue to exist through the dilation and evacuation procedure during which
a crushing instrument is inserted into a mother's uterus and pieces are
pulled off of the child and assembled on a sterile, white table to make sure
they all came out? Can America continue to endure the ammonite burning of
children by saline amniotic infusion that concludes in a hopeless struggle
against the severe pain of arsoned lungs and skin?
Today, 43
million ghosts of infanticide walk the fields and roads and city streets of
America. Victims of murder, their invisible presence moves hauntingly,
silently through our nation. The abject condemnation of life, legalized and
advertised since 1973, thrives and grows in every state. But the innocent
ghosts of infanticide cannot speak for themselves. We must do all we can to
speak for them.
How do we
speak for the dead? We join the pro-life movement as Americans joined the
abolitionist movement of the 1850s. We speak and we write, we rally and we
minister, we encourage and we contribute, we pray, until every life in every
place of America is legally - and culturally - protected.
The Life War
has gone on for too long. For the 43 million dead, we must carry on the
fight.
Hans
Zeiger is president of the Scout Honor Coalition, he writes a weekly column,
and he is a student at Hillsdale College. Contact: [email protected]
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