By Paul Greenberg*
November-December 1995 – When the lady from the Arkansas chapter of Right to Life called and asked W if I would accept its annual award for promoting the cause, I hesitated. Did she know she was talking not to a saint, but a sinner? As an editorial writer back in 1973, I had thought – and written – that Roe v. Wade sounded like a pretty sensible decision.
It seemed simple enough back then. Thanks to Roe v. Wade, those relatively few Americans needing an abortion for good reason would no longer have to thread their way through a tangle of state laws, or fl y to Sweden or somewhere. At last the decision would be safely left to the physician and patient, and that would be that. No one else need be concerned.
Here was an essentially private matter – abortion – that was on the periphery of medical and legal concerns, let alone social and political ones. Back then abortion wasn’t a litmus-test issue. Nor did it seem an ongoing constitutional concern like federal-state relations, or the balance of powers between the executive and legislative branches. It dealt with just one limited, technical, medical specialty. I confidently expected my first editorial on Roe v. Wade for the Pine Bluff Commercial to be my last on the subject.
In short, Right-to-Life was now proposing to give its award to somebody who couldn’t tell a slippery slope from a ukulele.
I think I would have smiled indulgently back then if you had told me that the debate over abortion would grow far more intense 20 years down the road, that abortion would become the kind of moral test for American society that slavery once was, and that in Roe v. Wade we were seeing the Dred Scott decision of the 20th century.
What I didn’t realize was that ideas have consequences, especially when they become embedded in law. The law, as they say, is a great teacher. What they don’t say is that it can teach not only good but evil, not only peace but turmoil, not only life but death.
For some time after Roe v. Wade, I carried on a running debate with a local Baptist preacher over whether the state constitution should protect life. The preacher, Mike Huckabee, would later become that rarity, a Republican lieutenant governor of Arkansas. (He’s now feeling out a race for the U.S. Senate.) On more than one occasion since, he has asked me what changed my mind about abortion. “A million and a half abortions a year” is the simplest answer. But there is more to it.
I hadn’t realized the dimensions of the social and political changes Roe v. Wade would come to symbolize – and license. And how that change would devalue not only life but the tenor of society in general. No nation can approve violence against the most innocent and vulnerable, and expect the effects of that approval to be limited.
By 1995, what had seemed a purely private decision in rare circumstances would become a standard method of birth control, an industry, a political litmus test, a rite of passage . . . a central tenet of a whole culture that centers not around life, its promise and responsibilities, but around self, its creation and cultivation.
Those unalienable rights to life and liberty Mr. Jefferson mentioned in the Declaration seem to have been eclipsed by a sad emphasis on the pursuit of happiness. And for all the happiness that the unbridled right to an abortion is supposed to make possible, no political question since slavery seems so heavy with guilt, and its denial. Or else there would be no reason for those who favor abortion to call it something else, “choice” being the most popular euphemism and “reproductive freedom” the most ironic.
The signs of this culture of death are now so common that they no longer stand out. In politics and economics, pop culture and art, lifestyle long ago replaced life. The general coarseness of today’s politics, today’s economics, today’s society did not spring up overnight; it is a consequence of a general disrespect for persons. When life ceases to be a right and becomes a power relationship, when any victims can be dismissed as unpersons, indignation and accusation will replace reason and respect in public discourse.
It’s happened before. The brutalities of the Third Reich in the 1930s did not arrive without warning; they were a logical extension of the enlightened eugenics of the 1920s, and its concept of liebensunwerten Lebens, or life not worth living. And therefore worth destroying. In the growing acceptance of abortion and euthanasia, one can see the advancing pincers of the same brutalizing idea.
It was in 1988 that Walker Percy, in a letter to the New York Times, pointed out whither we are tending. It was such a good letter, the Times declined to print it. It was also a remarkably restrained analysis of the abortion issue, and remains one of the most concise summaries of just what is being aborted: “Rather than enter the fray with one or another argument, which, whether true or not, seems to be unavailing,” wrote Percy, “I should like to call attention to certain social and historical consequences which may be less well known, [for] once the line is crossed, once that principle gains acceptance – judicially, medically, socially – [that] innocent human life can be destroyed for what ever reason, for the most admirable socioeconomic, medical, or social reasons – then it does not take a prophet to predict what will happen next.” The rise of Kevorkianism is only the next wave of the general disdain for life that seems to be setting in. Others will follow as surely as one transgression leads to another.
Academicians may argue whether these times are modern or post-modern, industrial or post-industrial, but one increasingly feels they are post-civilized. One recalls the response Gandhi is said to have made when, visiting London, he was asked what he thought of Western civilization. “I would be all for it,” he replied.
Earlier in this century, Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote about the dehumanization of art. Now we witness the dehumanization of the culture in general. It is hard to imagine a poet at the tag end of the 20th century celebrating man in the words of a 16th century English playwright: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.”
If man may still be seen as a paragon, he is no longer seen as an animal, a creature with a time to live and a time to die. Instead, man becomes self-creating, and therefore self-destroying, with an obligation only to self. A life becomes something to be designed, and to be destroyed at will – not sanctified, revered, celebrated, mourned.
It used to be said, in the kind of jest that is half serious, that Americans look upon death as a preventable disease. Now it can be said in all seriousness that we come to look on birth the same way. 
* Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette at Little Rock and a syndicated columnist.
