Forgive me for a moment of Ronald Reagan nostalgia, if it looks like that. I was rereading his “Abortion and the Conscience of America” in Human Life Review, which was published on the tenth anniversary of Roe v. Wade in 1983. Read along with me here:
Abortion concerns not just the unborn child, it concerns every one of us. The English poet, John Donne, wrote: “… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life—the unborn—without diminishing the value of all human life. We saw tragic proof of this truism last year when the Indiana courts allowed the starvation death of “Baby Doe” in Bloomington because the child had Down’s Syndrome.
Many of our fellow citizens grieve over the loss of life that has followed Roe v. Wade. Margaret Heckler, soon after being nominated to head the largest department of our government, Health and Human Services, told an audience that she believed abortion to be the greatest moral crisis facing our country today. And the revered Mother Teresa, who works in the streets of Calcutta ministering to dying people in her world-famous mission of mercy, has said that “the greatest misery of our time is the generalized abortion of children.”
I do believe it’s possible RFK Jr. can get to some places of overlap with pro-lifers (although it’s taking some time). But is anyone in this administration going to say abortion is the greatest moral crisis facing our country today? Because even after Dobbs, it is.