End of Roe a new beginning

When the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down by the Supreme Court, Mary Eberstadt's mother, a nurse, came home from work wearing a silver pin with two baby feet on it. She and her colleagues were wearing them to signify their refusal to participate in abortions. They weren't following the pope or bishops' orders. They didn't have the sonograms we have now, but they knew what was happening in a pregnant woman's womb.

Eberstadt -- in the first issue of National Review to come out after Roe v. Wade's fall -- writes about the indoctrination campaign that led to where we are today: the insistence that women need abortion to be free -- that somehow it is basic health care.

Whenever I hear the pro-abortion slogan "My body, my choice," I think of some of the girls I've encountered who wind up at abortion clinics. Seventeen-year-old girls who have been told they have to have the abortion by their mothers, or boyfriends, or both. Since the idea of chastity or abstinence has been branded as Christian fundamentalism and an impossible, warped concept, these women don't have a shot at understanding their own dignity or worth.

Our culture is cruel in telling them that sex is about pleasure and power alone.

"Given the sheer scale of that re-education project, it's small wonder that so many went so far astray," Eberstadt writes. "As the decades ground on, and the thrown-away piled up, and the hearts and minds pledged to their defense remained mostly outside once-polite society, more and more younger Americans came to hear nothing but the gospel according to Roe. One by one, their leaders bent before the idol of convenience. So, too, did plenty of their parents, at times even their churches. It fell to self-dealing hucksters like Hugh Hefner to seize the cultural initiative, normalizing the notion that one sophisticated solution to a problem is to kill it."

If we had sonogram photos of each and every aborted child -- at least 63 million of them in the 49 years of Roe -- would we stop pretending? Would we quit buying into the rhetoric that erases their brief existence on this Earth, instead of continuing the mass delusion?

How about we make things better for women? Rather than insisting that freedom means more abortion, how about uniting behind the reality, as Eberstadt writes, that "Thanks to Roe, for a very long time, men with the worst intentions have enjoyed carte blanche to behave heartlessly. That cultural permission now looks shakier than it has in 50 years." She adds: "in the name of renewed compassion for women, how about doubling the penalties for possession of date-rape drugs and imposing mandatory sentences for their use? Or toughening up paternity and child-support laws in every state? Or taking a closer look at a commercial surrogacy industry that treats mothers like domesticated animals and babies like high-end consumer choices?"

If we are serious about promoting what's best for women, we'd tackle the scourges that lead to abortion. A leader who really wants to lead in post-Roe America would talk about promoting the flourishing of families, rather than doubling down on abortion.

klopez@nationalreview.com