Books in Brief: To Rescue the Future

To Rescue the Future: The Pro-Life Movement in the 1980s, edited by Dave Andrusko (Life Cycle Books, 187 pp., $4.50)

This collection of essays on abortion, circulated by the National Right to Life Committee, provides more ammunition for the converted. The contributors to this volume have thought deeply about the medical, moral, and legal aspects of abortion, and given us intelligent and quite moving accounts of issues ranging from the Baby Doe euthanasia case to Supreme Court rulings in the Akron, Ashcroft, and Simopolous cases (which affirmed Roe v. Wade). There is hope for regulation of abortion under a revamped Supreme Court; but what about the political pressure that pro-life groups are supposed to be putting on legislators right now? This book does not adequately face up to the central organizing failure of the pro-life movement: namely, its inability to bring its various factions to agree on a piece of legislation before it is voted upon. New Right strategist Paul Weyrich advises, in probably the most savvy essay in the set, that waiting for the ultimate bill or constitutional amendment that will stop all abortions is “ineffective, perhaps immoral, because if one can take any steps toward stopping some abortions, that is a correct step provided that one keeps the ultimate objective in mind and continues to strive toward it.”

About the Author

Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D’Souza is a writer, scholar, and public intellectual. He is the author of America: Imagine A World Without Her, in which he explores the landscape of a world in which America had lost the Revolutionary War.

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To Rescue the Future: The Pro-Life Movement in the 1980s, edited by Dave Andrusko (Life Cycle Books, 187 pp., $4.50)

This collection of essays on abortion, circulated by the National Right to Life Committee, provides more ammunition for the converted. The contributors to this volume have thought deeply about the medical, moral, and legal aspects of abortion, and given us intelligent and quite moving accounts of issues ranging from the Baby Doe euthanasia case to Supreme Court rulings in the Akron, Ashcroft, and Simopolous cases (which affirmed Roe v. Wade). There is hope for regulation of abortion under a revamped Supreme Court; but what about the political pressure that pro-life groups are supposed to be putting on legislators right now? This book does not adequately face up to the central organizing failure of the pro-life movement: namely, its inability to bring its various factions to agree on a piece of legislation before it is voted upon. New Right strategist Paul Weyrich advises, in probably the most savvy essay in the set, that waiting for the ultimate bill or constitutional amendment that will stop all abortions is “ineffective, perhaps immoral, because if one can take any steps toward stopping some abortions, that is a correct step provided that one keeps the ultimate objective in mind and continues to strive toward it.”

About the Author

Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D’Souza is a writer, scholar, and public intellectual. He is the author of America: Imagine A World Without Her, in which he explores the landscape of a world in which America had lost the Revolutionary War.