Estelle Griswold was a Planned Parenthood physician. The case was Griswold v. Connecticut and it was 1965. The Supreme Court ruled that no state could have any regulation on the dispensing of birth control and that married couples were free to choose what they wished to do about using it. No interference and no laws would prohibit this. Period.
Now the year is 1973, and the Supreme Court again makes two monumental rulings—Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. This time it says that abortion for any reason at any time during pregnancy is to be allowed—and with no restrictions whatsoever.
Fast-forward to 2013 and the bombshell report from the Charlotte Lozier Institute that the new Obamacare multi-state health plans are “a potential avenue to tens of thousands of publicly subsidized abortions.” According to this report, one avenue for the payment of abortion through the Affordable Care Act would be via the Navigator program—a separate stream of ACA funding—recipients of which happen to include Planned Parenthood!
States are not satisfied with merely permitting Planned Parenthood to get involved ever deeper in the killing of the preborn child. Some of them are passing laws that make it possible for nurses and midwives to abort these babies as well. In fact, one study claims that such abortions are perfectly safe.
Our cultural affinity for aborting the preborn human individual has become so engrained in the social psyche that some researchers are suggesting that abortion is birth control. The argument is that a “once-a-month-pill” that acts to abort the preborn child could be defined as birth control. According to the report, experts from Sweden and the U.S. state that “a woman could potentially use a post-fertilization method on a planned schedule only once in each menstrual cycle, no matter how many prior coital acts she had had in that cycle.”
Such a chemical compound would be marketed as contraception, much the same way as the morning-after pill and the regular birth control pill are, even though in many cases the common pill aborts a child—not to mention the chemical action of a Plan B or this newest generation of pills that kill.
What has happened over the span of the last two generations in our history is that citizens have become complacent about what it means to abort a child. Many view the entire topic as something that should be left to politicians to sort out, while others, particularly Christians, argue that while they personally would never have an abortion, they sure wouldn’t suggest to someone else that abortion is wrong.
Such blasé attitudes about something as grave as the killing of an innocent person reminds me of a goal that was set forth in the California Journal of Medicine in 1970. The editorial read:
What is not yet so clearly perceived is that in order to bring this [decriminalized abortion] about hard choices will have to be made with respect to what is to be preserved and strengthened and what is not, and that this will of necessity violate and ultimately destroy the traditional Western ethic with all that this portends. It will become necessary and acceptable to place relative rather than absolute values on such things as human lives, the use of scarce resources and the various elements which are to make up the quality of life or of living which is to be sought. This is quite distinctly at variance with the Judeo-Christian ethic and carries serious philosophical, social, economic, and political implications for Western society and perhaps for world society.
The author of these words should be quite pleased to know that, today, this nation has all but rejected the Judeo-Christian ethic in matters pertinent to respect for intrinsic human rights.
The deception has been absorbed into the cultural framework and is now deeply embedded in medical practices. Ethics is now sadly renamed as bioethics. And our speech reflects the acceptance of this new culture.
How tragic that such lethal practices are widely accepted with nary a whimper.