EDITORIAL: Let's call it the 'Wrong Choice Movement'

A new verbal effort in our fundamental human rights struggle to defend life.

LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - Like millions of people throughout the world, I have spent much of my adult life in the struggle to end the most egregious human rights violation of our age - the one which is wrongfully protected by positive law in most Western Nations - the killing of our first neighbors, children in the womb, through abortion.

I have done so with my pen, with my mouth, with my law license and, most importantly, on my knees.

In this struggle, I have met many who have come to see the truth of the horror of legal abortion for what it actually is; another entire class of persons is being treated as property to be disposed of by someone with more power, while the Government protects the oppressor and calls the killing a "right".

One of the ones whose eyes were opened on this subject was Dr. Bernard Nathanson. In his own words, he was "personally responsible for 75,000 abortions..." I have known Bernie for years. I knew him back when he was a "pro-life atheist".

He was a useful ally in the Pro-life cause even then because his claim enabled me to make the truth clear that being "Pro-Life" is not, in the first instance, a "religious" position. Rather, it is a human rights position.

Then, I, like so many Christians who had been praying for Bernie, rejoiced when he was baptized into the Catholic Church. I am honored to call him my brother in the Lord. He is a modern Saint Paul, made new in Christ and now being used profoundly to effect major conversion.

Any one of my readers one who has not yet already done so, needs to read Dr. Bernard Nathansons' marvelous story. It was the development of ultrasound that, above all else, opened his eyes to the truth.

His 1984 documentary "The Silent Scream" and second documentary "Eclipse of Reason", uncover the evil of the killing from right within the first home of the whole human race, the womb. His books "Aborting America" and "The Hand of God" should be required reading for anyone who cares about this fundamental human rights issue.

However, it is Bernie's honesty about the use of propaganda by the movement which he helped to fashion which has recently begun to gnaw away at me.

He will be the first to admit that it was when that movement began to use the language of "choice" that they began to make great headway in their effort to "legalize" the taking of innocent human life in the womb through all nine months of pregnancy.

In fact, medical science now confirms what we have all known all along, that the child in the womb is a human person. Very few advocates of legal abortion actually dispute that issue any longer.

Oh, some still nip away at the edge of the horror by attempting to argue that the dependency of the child in the womb on another makes her less than "human", but they know better. Such an argument undercuts their entire foundation for caring for the weak and the vulnerable outside of the womb.

So, they are increasingly jettisoning that approach as well.

Now, what is left is language, the very language which Bernie and others unleashed in the rhetorical war that propelled the evil that has produced the regime of legalized abortion on demand; the language of "choice".

There is nothing as powerful as the language of choice. Especially in a Western culture which has discarded any sense of an objective moral code by which our choices must be measured and adopted in its place a libertine standard for the exercise of personal liberty.

However, even if the concept of 'ordered liberty' in the West has been replaced by license, and even if the notion that freedom equals a right to do what one pleases has seemingly prevailed, there is still a conscience in men and women, as well as in Nations.

There is also an undeniable recognition that some choices are simply wrong.

So, I make a modest proposal to my readers. Join me in a new verbal battle in this fundamental human rights struggle. Let us now refer to those who support the legalization of the killing of innocent human life in the womb by abortion as the "Wrong Choice Movement".

I believe that such a verbal shift may reopen a front which has all but been lost in our fundamental human rights movement, the war for words with which to win hearts and change the culture.

The movement called "Pro-Life" is a human rights movement and a crusade for freedom.

Without the right to be life there are no other rights and without the freedom to be born there are no other freedoms. However, the use of the word "choice" by those who support legal abortion has taken its toll. Few people will call themselves "Pro-Abortion" and bristle at the term being used in public discourse. "No" they insist, "we are simply not in favor of letting the Government make such deeply personal choices".

Ah, the shrewdness of Bernie's plan has certainly been borne out.

And, the failures in the efforts to secure the Pro-life ground by using "conservative", "neo-conservative" or "libertarian" political language has also been exposed. After all, some now argue that the true "conservative' (or "neo-conservative" or "libertarian") person would want to maximize "personal freedom" and keep the government out of our "personal" lives.

Notice the meeting at the back door of the rhetoric of "pro-choice" between the contemporary "liberal" and the contemporary "libertarian". The language of the 2008 election, concerning the issue of abortion, will clearly be an effort to argue that no-one is "Pro-Abortion", they are just in favor of letting the woman decide and not the State.

That is why, like all great human rights struggles, the struggle to protect this entire class of persons, children in the first home of the womb, our first neighbors, must transcend ideology. It must be grounded in the language of the Natural Law and argued as a matter of fundamental human rights.

We all know it is wrong to take innocent human life. How do we know that? The Natural Law reveals fundamental human rights. Just as we all now admit that slavery was, and is, wrong.

Natural Law reasoning as a basis for our Social Justice claims will take time to reassert in Western Jurisprudence and in contemporary political discourse. However, asserting an ethics of choice, one which questions whether some choices are right or wrong, has the possibility of immediately catching hold. We must insist that some choices are always and everywhere wrong.

One of those wrong choices is the taking of innocent human life.It should be illegal.

It is increasingly rare for anyone to argue that the child in the womb is not a human life. The advances in intrauterine surgical procedures support the contention that the baby in the womb is one of us and deserves our care. The growing trend in our criminal law which allows for the double prosecution of those who kill or injure the mother and, in the process, kill or injure the child she carries, also supports our effort.

I am going to begin calling the movement which supports legal abortion the "Wrong Choice" movement. I believe that such a term reopens the debate precisely at the time when it is most needed.

I invite my readers to consider doing the same.

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