Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation

This essay by President Reagan clearly establishes the case for sound moral and constitutional principles as the bedrock of our society. It's timeless and should be read by all voters as they consider who they will support in the upcoming 2008 elections. And it should be a required read for everyone appointed to State and Federal positions--and yes, our Supreme Court!

The short essay by President Reagan is wrtten in such a way as to clearly accentuate the importance of all human life - particularly that of the unborn, defensless babe - without "bashing" those who somehow feel abortion has to do with the rights of a woman and not the rights of the babies life.Great job of speaking for those that are not yet unable to speak for themselves.

Ronald Reagan clearly understood the intrinsic worth of every life. This is what animated his political philosophy, it is clealy the cornerstone in the concept that government derives its power from the individual people it purports to speak for, and as both Clark and Johnston point out, it is precisely this regard for individual human lives that distinguishes a free republic from the evil empire of communism which saw human lives as mere grist for the mill of history and tools of the state.Thank God for Ronald Reagan!

Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation is an historically important document and one of the most passionate and well-argued pro-life essays ever written. The publication of such an essay by a President while in office (and in his first term, no less) was unheard of, but the knowledge that some 15 million unborn children had been aborted in the first ten years after abortion was legalized in this country compelled Ronald Reagan to do something to put an end to a practice doing irreparable harm to both families and the entire nation. The essay is a short but brilliant condemnation of abortion. The issue affects all of us, Reagan insists, because the diminishment of the life of the unborn diminishes the value of all human life. He exposes the ugly underside of the pro-abortion "quality of life" argument, likening it to slavery, drawing parallels between the Roe vs. Wade decision and the Dred Scot decision that divided Americans over a century earlier. The "quality of life" argument is an argument for quality control of the population, according to Reagan. It says that some human lives are worthless and thus deserving of death; as such, it is a dark echo of the Holocaust which has now inconceivably been endowed with the quality of "mercy." Legalized abortion, Reagan makes clear, put America at the top of a very slippery slope. Not only are unborn babies being killed because they are not wanted, many are killed because of defects - someone decides that such a child would be a burden on the parents and family or the child will not be able to live a "normal" life. Such babies are dubbed useless and without value by the abortionist proponents and are thus denied the human rights our Founding Fathers promised every American. Just as slaves were denied the value of their human lives in America's past, "useless" unborn babies are now being denied that same value of human life. Such arbitrary evaluation of unborn lives must stop, Reagan says. Such thinking leads naturally to further crimes such as infanticide. Such a case the previous year served to compel Reagan to write this very essay. The courts of Indiana had allowed "Baby Doe" to starve to death after his birth because the child had Down's Syndrome. In essence, retardation had been equated to a crime, one which deserved the death penalty. No nation can survive and prosper when a group of individuals can look at a child and declare whether that child has any value as a human being. The core of Reagan's forceful argument is to be found here: America has two choices. It can be a nation wherein some human lives are declared to be of no value, or it can be a nation who protects and defends the sanctity of all life. We cannot survive as a free nation, Reagan declares, "when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide." That is the core of Reagan's eloquent and insightful essay.I cannot speak to the accompanying articles in the new