Today we remember forty years since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision responsible for the death of over 50 million Americans who were never able to take their first breath. Now forty years later, we peer down the corridors of history, and seeing the deaths of so many innocents, echo the despair the poet William Wordsworth so eloquently expressed:
…a simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death!
Roe ushered us into an altered culture — one tainted by a strain of grief, as mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters have been denied the chance of hearing themselves called by those names. . .
We have children perishing before they even have a chance to live, women dying at the hands of abortion doctors, and a culture numb to the dignity of the human person. Rather than women being liberated, they are now, more than ever, exploited and lied to by an industry which dishonestly seeks the profits enabled by desperation and victimization.
Forty years ago, we did not know the depth of these sorrows that lay ahead. For the present is always constructed by realities unknown in the past. Over 50 million sacrificed to “choice” and a perverted concept of liberty. Who could have imagined?
As we commemorate this sad anniversary, we confront a culture in which the major power centers of the media and the academy and the medical establishment refuse to assess how much damage the abortion industry has inflicted upon women since Roe.
Nevertheless, we ask with determination: “Where do we go from here?” For even though so-called “choice” was made legal forty years ago, the real choice is with us now, when we decide as a generation if the past will dictate the future . . .or if we can harness the power to change it.
As we stand at this, a critical moment of decision, we must have the courage to believe that the moral landscape of the present does not dictate our hope for the future. We must decide to create a future where women are protected from exploitation, where all citizens of this country, whether born or unborn are treated with dignity, and where our laws and our way of life undergird the responsibility we have to protect one another.
This is the Culture of Life. This is our America. This is the post-Roe nation.
Let us renew our resolve to continue to fight for life, today, tomorrow, the next day and the next — until all are welcomed in life and protected in law.
