"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Nations are not machines or equations. They are like ecosystems. A people's habits, beliefs, values and institutions intertwine like a root system.
Poisoning one part will eventually poison it all. As a result, bad laws and bad court decisions produce degraded political thought and behavior, and vice versa.
So it is with the legacy of Roe vs. Wade. Roe effectively legalized abortion throughout pregnancy for virtually any reason, or none at all.
It is responsible for the grief of millions of women and men, and the killing of millions of unborn children in the past quarter century.
Yet the weaknesses of the Supreme Court's 1973 reasoning are well known. They were acknowledged by the Supreme Court itself in the subsequent 1992 Casey decision, which could find no better reason to uphold Roe than the habits Roe itself created by surviving for 20 years.
The feebleness and confusion of the Casey decision flow directly out of Roe's own confusion. They are part of the same root system. Taking a distorted "right to privacy" to new heights, and developing a new moral calculus to justify it, Roe has spread through the American political ecology with toxic results.
Roe effectively rendered the definition of human personhood flexible and negotiable.
It also implicitly excluded unborn children from human status.
In doing so, Roe helped create an environment in which infanticide -- a predictable next step along the continuum of killing -- is now open to serious examination.
Thanks ultimately to Roe, some today speculate publicly and sympathetically why a number of young American women kill their newborn babies or leave them to die.
Even the word "infanticide" is being replaced by new and less emotionally charged words like "neonaticide" (killing a newborn on the day of his or her birth) and "filicide" (killing the baby at some later point).
Revising the name given to the killing reduces its perceived gravity.
This is the ecology of law, moral reasoning and language in action. Bad law and defective moral reasoning produce the evasive language to justify evil.
Nothing else can explain the verbal and ethical gymnastics required by elected officials to justify their support for partial-birth abortion, a procedure in which infants are brutally killed during the process of delivery.
The same sanitized marketing is now deployed on behalf of physician-assisted suicide, fetal experimentation and human cloning. Each reduces the human person to a problem or an object. Each can trace its lineage in no small part to Roe.
Obviously Roe is only one of several social watersheds which have shaped the America of the late 1990s. But it is a uniquely destructive one. In the 25 years since Roe, our society's confusion about the relationship of law, moral reasoning and language has created more and more cynicism in the electorate.
As words become unmoored from their meaning (as in "choice" or "terminating a pregnancy"), and as the ideas and ideals which bind us together erode, democratic participation inevitably declines. So too does a healthy and appropriate patriotism.
Today the challenge facing America is to find freedom's fulfillment in truth; the truth that is intrinsic to human life created in God's image and likeness, the truth that is written on the human heart, the truth that can be known by reason and can therefore form the basis of a profound and universal dialogue among people about the direction they must give to their lives and their activities."
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."