Abortion is essentially a moral issue just
like slavery was. Both revolve around the value we attach to human life.
Entire civilisations lived with slavery for centuries but ultimately inescapable
morality had to be recognized and the political consequences accepted,
whatever the cost ... [In the U.S.A. in the 19th Century] a powerful case
for slavery could be, and was made, and enforced by the huge special interests
which had grown up around it. Time and again the subject bubbled up to
the surface, and subsided as yet another compromise was thrown over it.
It seemed in everybody's interest to avoid a showdown. But the issue was
morally too important for that. It would not go away and in the end it
involved the United States in a war which killed a million people and destroyed
a society and a way of life forever. The price America had to pay was enormous,
but Americans decided it had to be paid. Today it is hard not to find any
American, even in the South who would not agree that slavery had to be
amended even at the cost of a civil war....
Slavery was tolerable only
when it was shrouded in ignorance, euphemism and deception. the more you
knew about its realities the more its ugly facts were uncovered, the higher
the gorge rose. The decisive moment in America came when Harriet Beecher
Stowe, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, brought the horrible essence of slavery home
to millions. The case against abortions has yet to find its Harriet Beecher
Stowe. But it will.
It is notable that every time
the truth about the nature of abortion breaks the surface- as it did in
the case involving the killing of a twin - more and more people including
doctors themselves ask questions about the morality of the whole evil business.
-Paul Johnson, The Spectator (August 17,1996)