In Memoriam Christina Reagan
Morris, Edmund
The sanctity of the womb, that once-inviolate limbo whose dark waters were home only to the spirit of God, has become so subject to alien invasion in recent years that I was not surprised, at a...
...Without waiting for me to swallow my vichyssoise, she fished from her purse an image I was too polite to recoil from...
...But their datedness can only increase, because—let us admit it—the battle against legalized abortion is lost...
...notion that one life (unwanted, first trimester) was worth less than another (ditto, second trimester), and less still than another (ditto, third trimester)—although, in certain mother-threatening circumstances, lives one and three might be considered equally expendable...
...The sanctity of the womb, that once-inviolate limbo whose dark waters were home only to the spirit of God, has become so subject to alien invasion in recent years that I was not surprised, at a dinner party last fall, when my hostess asked if I would like to see a "snapshot" of her future daughter...
...She's yawning," cooed Mama...
...He did not hesitate to compare Roe v. Wade to another 7-2 decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in denial of human rights, and took comfort in the fact that it, too, won majority acceptance in its day...
...Taken together, the three pieces reacttoday as eloquent but dated testimonials to a time when—for a shining moment even briefer than Camelot—it seemed that the Constitution might be amended (or reinterpreted) in defense of our least articulate, most vulnerable minority...
...The very heat, even violence, of our debate on abortion proves that here, not in old, cold countries like Sweden, is where the world's great moral problems are still decided...
...He is currently writing an authorized biography of Ronald Reagan...
...Nowhere do the plain words of the Constitution even hint at a `right' so sweeping as to permit abortion up to the time the child is ready to be born," he wrote...
...The most striking thing about pro-choice literature—as distinct from pro-choice polemics—is its admission that the black bird of bereavement flaps low over all thinking aborters and abortees: And thou treble-dated crow That thy sable gender mak'st With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st 'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.1 I have often wondered if it was the beat of those same wings that drove Ronald Reagan to publish "Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation" at a time when he needed controversy the least...
...But it is a largely forgotten fact that he once lost a neonate daughter of his own...
...But the grotesque pun, the awful paradox, is that it's his "issue" too...
...CI...
...She was born prematurely to Mr...
...This is still the most compassionate of nations...
...Gentlest of men, he has never, as far as I know, been party to an abortion...
...Well, He sure wastes plenty in plagues—including the current one of AIDS, which at 100-percent fatality beats even Russia's abortion rate...
...Reagan confronted a fundamental human problem...
...I just hope that sometime soon He'll lift the darkness on the face of the deep, and tell us which way to look for Light...
...Such lessons in mortality change a man...
...Man's tragedy has always been that nothing can be done to help him in the end...
...A majority of Americans, including those in Congress and the Supreme Court, now believe that women should be allowed to decide which of their progeny may survive, and which not...
...That essay, itself commemorating the tenth anniversary of Edmund Morris is the author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt...
...Indeed I am glad I did not, for the snap turned out to be a sonogram, and to my surprise had an eerie, crosshatched beauty, reminiscent of the Capriccios of Goya...
...Is it not cruel of God, thus to waste His unborn...
...That last phrase is Hazlitt's, by the way...
...It came out of my pen unbidden, and only now, reflecting, do I connect it with his essay on Tragedy...
...One's hunch is that God in His mercy will decide it for us, having heard from the Silent Parties on a frequency beyond our range...
...hanks largely to Ronald Reagan, those of totalitarianism and mutual assured destruction have yielded to a civilized consensus...
...Already, the President noted, a baby unquestionably born in Indiana had been allowed to starve to death because of its inconvenient combination of a malformed esophagus and Down's syndrome: The real issue for the courts was not whether baby Doe was a human being...
...Just as the Supreme Court thereby institutionalized racism for another century, so, Mr...
...For two particularly poignant examples of pro-choice literature, see "The Clinic," by Michael Blumenthal (New York Times Magazine, November 2, 1986), and "We Do Abortions Here," by Sallie Tisdale (Harper's, October 1987...
...Nor should we flatter ourselves that we have any monopoly on grief...
...Yet this is what the Court ruled [in 1973...
...There remains the most anguished question of all—anguished because we must ask it a million and a half times a year: whether that many unborn children are to be or not to be...
...Those of us in whom abortion strikes a deep note of moral despair must accept that we are citizens of a secular democracy, governed by laws not of God, but man...
...There, floating in shadows_ and space-time, was a pale, preparturient child, eyes still veiled with sleep, tiny fists half-curled, and mouth urgently agape...
...It seemed to me that she was shouting—silently, to be sure, yet this sonogram, this picture of sounds beyond hearing, reverberated with the first of all human cries: "I want to be born...
...It is a question, moreover, involving in each case three parties, one of whom has no power of legal protest, and the other of whom has no voice at all...
...Reagan' s first wife, Jane Wyman, on June 23, 1947, and died three days later...
...No expectant father who sympathizes with the dilemma of the expectant mother—to live for herself only, or also for the life within her—can deny her right, ultimately, to bring the issue to a violent conclusion...
...Reagan argued, would a new eugenics begin to flow from Roe's ' Shakespeare, "The Phoenix and the Turtle...
...Ironically, he could not be present at either birth or burial, since he was himself fighting death, in another hospital, with viral pneumonia...
...Roe v. Wade, was subsequently republished in book form by Thomas Nelson Inc., along with afterwords by C. Everett Koop and Malcolm Muggeridge...
...Her name was Christina...
...If it proves as effective and popular a method of pregnancy control here as in Europe, the French pill will replace the French letter as America's refiner of the species...
...In other words, (its] retardation was the equivalent of a crime deserving the death penalty...
...W hatever the cause, one has to admire, in these days of presidential pusillanimity, the courage with which Mr...
...We may congratulate ourselves, or perhaps more aptly, thank God, that the sacrifice sanctioned by the Indiana Supreme Court has not become the "humane holocaust" Ronald Reagan feared a decade ago...
...His curse, now, is that everything may be done to hinder his very beginnings...
...Of course the time will eventually come for her to utter the second great mortal shout—"I'm afraid to die...
...Since He created the heaven and the earth to begin with, I guess He knows what He's about...
...The real issue was whether to protect the life of a human being . . . who would probably be mentally handicapped...
...One's dread is that, after all the debate, our democracy may find itself unequal to the task of deciding—that perhaps the question is unresolvable, and the agony it causes infinite...
...It pleases me to note that Miss Caroline Burt has been granted her wish, and neighbors will attest that she is now quite audible...
...Inevitably, this or a forthcoming administration is going to start testing the RU-486 antiprogesterone medicine...
...en years ago this spring, President Ronald T Reagan published an extraordinary essay, "Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation," in the Human Life Review...
Vol. 26 • August 1993 • No. 8
