When the news broke that President Reagan had died, my 16-year-old daughter couldn’t understand how I couldn’t understand that she didn’t understand how great a loss America had just suffered.
Like so many, including many people much older than she, my daughter did not have the kind of first-hand familiarity with our 40th President that old geezers like me do.
Yesterday, we talked about some of Mr. Reagan’s important contributions to the cause of life. I mentioned in passing that even some of his harshest critics issued statements praising his courage and conviction.
But something I didn’t elaborate on was the not-so-subtle hint we hear that, unlike President George W. Bush, Reagan was so amiable a guy that he never generated the kind of intensely personal opposition that President Bush faces.
This is so incredible wrong-headed that you almost don’t know where to begin.
As a policy maker, President Reagan would settle, when necessary, for singles and doubles, but he was not afraid to swing for the fences. His bold initiatives in areas beyond our purview as pro-lifers were greeted with a level of animosity and antagonism and sheer hatred that rivals anything leveled by even the loonier critics of President Bush.
That applied to our concerns as well. President Reagan was up-front in his opposition to abortion. This was not popular with the Media Establishment, and he was routinely pounded from New York Times pillar to Washington Post.
Among other things, Mr. Reagan wrote a book, “Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation,†announced the "Mexico City Policy," which banned U.S. funding of private organizations that perform abortions or work to legalize abortion in foreign countries, and filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
This won him few plaudits from the opinion-makers.
But nothing generated the kind of hysteria that greeted the President’s attempt to protect infants with handicaps from lethal neglect. In response, only the Medical Establishment rivaled the editorial pages of the “mainstream media†for sheer vituperation. A word of background.
Spurred by the 1982 starvation death of a baby born with Down Syndrome, the Reagan Administration attempted to use regulations issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, under authority of a law prohibiting discrimination against the handicapped in federally funded institutions, to prevent withholding of medically indicated treatment. Thinking back more than two decades later, I am still stunned by the ferocity of the opposition to what critics instantly dubbed “Big Brother in the Nursery.â€
Along the way a number of stunning revelations took place that shone light on some very grim, dark practices. The common denominator in all of these reports was a radical devaluation of the lives of babies born with handicaps. In some cases proponents of lethal neglect boldly published accounts of selective euthanasia of those babies whom doctors determined to lack a sufficient “quality of life.â€
But President Reagan and his Justice Department never faltered. They suffered a setback in early 1984 when medical groups persuaded an appeals court panel to deny the government access to the medical records of another injured newborn whose parents had received court approval to pursue custodial care only. But thanks to incredible persistence by pro-life leadership in Congress and the President, Mr. Reagan was able to sign the “Child Abuse Amendment of 1984" which defined “withholding of medically indicated treatment†as a form of child abuse.
If there is any one theme that has cropped up in the last few years, it is that President Reagan had been vastly underrated. A major part of the explanation is the appearance of books such as “Reagan: A Life In Letters,†and “Reagan, In His Own Hand.â€
In them we find revealed an intellectually curious, prodigious writer who not only wrote thousands of thoughtful letters, but who also in the late 1970s delivered more than a thousand radio addresses. We learn that he wrote two-thirds of them himself.
"In writing these daily essays on almost every national policy issue during the 1970s, Reagan was acting as a one-man think tank,†argue the editors of “Reagan, In His Own Hand.†Always content to be underrated, the President joked about not working hard. Nothing could be further from the truth.
It could be easy for newcomers to the Movement, those whose knowledge of the 1980s might be limited to what they read in less-than-charitable history books, to underrate the President’s enormously important contribution to what we are about. He was the first openly pro-life President, which did not win him many friends among the Media Elite.
But Mr. Reagan stuck by his guns. More specifically, he stuck by the babies.
Someday the reign of Roe will collapse. I say that with the same confidence that Ronald Reagan predicted that one day Communism would be “left on the ash heap of history.â€
And when that great day comes, when the littlest Americans once again receive the protection of the law, it will be in no small part because of the indispensible work of President Ronald Wilson Reagan.
When the news broke that President Reagan had died, my 16-year-old daughter couldn’t understand how I couldn’t understand that she didn’t understand how great a loss America had just suffered.