Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation – Book by Ronald Reagan
with the remarks by C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General of the United States under President Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989.
President Reagan shared that the implications of his signing the first abortion bill in the nation (California, supposedly only to save the life of the mother) were that the criteria would be manipulated and abused to begin the slippery slope leading to abortion on demand today. He regretted that he was an unsuspecting catalyst.
Book Summary: The title of this book is Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation and it was written by Ronald Reagan, C. Everett Koop (Afterword), Malcolm Muggeridge (Afterword). This particular edition is in a Hardcover format. This book’s publication date is Apr 01, 1984.
Daniel’s Bookshelves Review Jul 4, 2008
Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation is a 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, but many are also 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 that 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 edition of this book, as they differ from those in my older edition. Reagan’s essay, though, is one of the most powerful and logical anti-abortion arguments in the library of pro-life advocates. More timely than ever, this is an essay that all Americans should read and ponder over.
Violence: 1a : the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy
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