What Comes After Abortion?

Chuck Colson: Yesterday was the twenty-ninth anniversary of legalized abortion. Many of you marched for life. That's good. But today there's more to the question of life than just abortion. Stay tuned to BreakPoint as bioethicist and Dean of the Wilberforce Forum, Nigel Cameron, answers the question, "What comes after abortion?"   Nigel Cameron: Yesterday we saw one of the great events in the American calendar, the March for Life. From all over the nation tens of thousands of people, young and old, came here to Washington to say once again -- on the terrible anniversary of Roe v. Wade - - "THIS SHALL NOT STAND!"   Yet Roe seems a long time ago now. 1973 was the year before my wife and I were married, and last year we became grandparents. That truly is one whole generation, and a lot has happened since.   Do you remember the stirring movie series Whatever Happened to the Human Race? with C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer? I was back in my native Scotland then and was asked to organize the premier showing to Christian leaders. Those five films had one theme: that abortion and infanticide and euthanasia are all at root the same thing, the killing of human beings, and that one will surely lead to another. And, back of that, as Schaeffer never tired of saying, your worldview determines everything else. How right they were. Abortion hangs like a black cloud over our civilization. And now Peter Singer at Princeton supports killing handicapped babies. And in Oregon physicians give their patients deadly drugs, and the law approves.   Yet this year something is different. Because in the past twelve months we have seen a dramatic step that back in 1973, or '83, or even '93, would have seemed like sheer science fiction. For human beings, tiny human beings, members of our species, have been cloned. They died very, very young, before they could even be used for the experiments for which sole purpose they had been made. Like all human beings, they lived, and they died. But unlike any other human being, they were made in a lab, photocopies of somebody else -- science fiction come true.   We'll return to that later in the week. I don't want to depress you, but in a fallen world there are often depressing facts to face. The evil of abortion has crept out of the womb, just as Schaeffer and Koop said it would, to threaten all of us with euthanasia. It's now being followed by a whole new set of evils. For the biotech firms have plans for us -- patenting our genes, cloning us so they can experiment on us and use "us" in our own treatment, improving us and letting us choose what kind of kids we want to have. What Huxley called the Brave New World, and C.S. Lewis the Abolition of Man, has arrived.   All of a sudden, there is a lot more on the agenda than most of us ever realized. Our march for life just got longer, the road steeper, the challenges greater than we had ever imagined.   These BreakPoints are focused on those challenges because we want to help you get the big picture and see how the parts fit together. Then you'll be prepared to play your part in defending human life against the challenges, old and new, of the twenty- first century.   Chuck Colson: Thank you, Nigel. This assault on the value and meaning of human life is one of the greatest threats our civilization has ever faced. Christians must be leading the charge to protect human dignity and values.       For further reading: Dr. Nigel M. de S. Cameron, The New Medicine (Crossway, 1992).   Charles Colson, "Can We Prevent the Abolition of Man?", an address to U.S. Congress members and staff. C. Everett Koop and Francis A. Schaeffer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (Crossway, 1983).   Learn more about the Wilberforce Forum's newest initiative, the Council for Biotechnology Policy.   Join the "Shake the Nation" campaign in rattling Capitol Hill by urging U.S. Senators to confirm pro- life judges.

01/23/02