MASSIVE FACT ^_[1]

INFAMOUS DECISION

1. On January 22, 1973 the Supreme Court abolished the abortion laws of all fifty states. The members of the Court, in an unprecedented and disturbing act of social engineering, wrenched the United States from its Judeo-Christian tradition of reverence for human life. Many have called the court's anti-life decision in Roe vs. Wade, a profoundly disturbing act of judicial arrogance. 

2.  Only one judicial precedent approximates the court's sullen and dispirited ruling of 1973. In its infamous Dred Scott decision  (1857),^[2] the Court attempted to engineer the legitimacy of slavery by declaring that it had no power to restrict slavery in U.S. territories. Three concurring justices further opined that negroes descended from slaves had no standing in court because, ipso facto, they possessed no rights as Americans.

SOCIAL ENGINEERING

3.  The Dred Scott decision destabilized the already explosive political and cultural climate of pre-Civil War America and was a significant factor leading to the War Between the States.  Some commentators claim that no one, including the justices themselves, could have foreseen the magnitude of the Courts Roe vs. Wade decision  (1973),^[3] that the justices merely sought to make uniform the laws of the fifty states and to provide a judicial remedy for relatively few instances of personal hardship.

4.  Certainly the court's suppression of laws founded upon our nations religious and cultural patrimony did compel judicial uniformity. But not without catastrophic personal and social consequences. Within the past two decades, the novelty of social engineering has shifted to a national infatuation with genetic and medical engineering. Medical ethicists are voicing concerns about the significant risks that bio-tech innovations pose for the present and future.

STAGGERING COMPLEXITY

5.  The staggering complexity of interrelated life issues threatens to overwhelm hospital ethics boards and federal regulatory agencies. American law, by definition, is ill-suited as an instrument of meticulous control of human activities. Yet more and more persons employ the judicial system as a forum in which to articulate their claims or grievances, or most ominously, their political agendas. Cultural and religious ethicists of impeccable caliber are urgently needed.  Historically, scientific research has recognized the value of systematic criticism for the purpose of correcting its errors as quickly as possible.

6.  Exploratory science and medicine, invoking the altruistic impulses of humanity  (for comfort, cure, longevity), enjoy privileged status in our society. Nevertheless, disturbing examples surface regularly of improperly designed and poorly administered experimental studies involving human subjects. In the rush to gain recognition, funding and product markets, researchers frequently announce dramatic discoveries before their trial studies are actually concluded or evaluated.

BIZARRE CLAIMS

7.  Media coverage of bio-tech research is characterized typically by naive and uncritical acceptance of even the most bizarre claims. Thus the public's appetite is aroused for immediate employment of publicized discoveries. Thus many persons are ensnared in the trap of psychological reductionism:  "...the collapsing of complex events into single, all-embracing explanations, in ways that sweep away rather than illuminate the interlocking structures and motivations behind those events. In that kind of reductionism, one can sacrifice psychological accuracy no less than moral sensitivity."^[4]

8.  No event has had a more adverse and destabilizing impact on religion and culture in 20^th America than Roe vs. Wade. With this decision, the Supreme Court enshrined the imperial self ^[5] as the source and arbiter of all human rights.

COMPARED TO ORAL HYGIENE

9.  In his landmark encyclical Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II denounced this casuistry by demonstrating that a social order predicated on the deification of the autonomous self cannot remain in equilibrium:  "Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds. Each one wishes to assert himself independently of the other and in fact intends to make his own interest prevail."^[6]

10.  The massive fact remains that more than 50 million voiceless unborn--most innocent human beings^[7]--have forfeited their lives to abortion in the past 40 years. This holocaust testifies to a horrifying uniformity of indifference and hostility to our nation's children. Abortion, once considered an extreme medical remedy, has been so trivialized that it is compared by its advocates to oral hygiene in significance. Although man, by nature, struggles to understand the mystery of death and to come to terms with it, no historical precedent surpasses the contemporary American trend to enshrine the trivialization, manipulation and even exaltation of death in its political and judicial structures.

PRINCIPLED COLLOQUY

11.  Dr. J. Kerkvorkian's grisly business in recent years is symptomatic of our culture's growing addiction to death. His media-oriented uniform remedy of physician-engineered suicide for the sick and suffering signaled a gathering darkness threatening our nation's religious and cultural vitality.^[8] As the Supreme Courts 1973 decision tragically reveals, few forums exist in secular domain for authentic dialogue regarding social-cultural consequences.

12.  All too often moral judgment is confused with an individual's urge to generalize the merits of his particular experience and the values motivating him at the moment. Christian theology and philosophy, however, offer an essential vocabulary, a means by which we may discover how to frame and to conduct a principled colloquy regarding critical life issues. Whether urgent problems are political, cultural or scientific in origin, both theology and philosophy help to correct social instability.

GENUINE ANTHROPOLOGY

13.  Moreover, there is an urgent need for the transcendent perspective. It is essential that public policy and bio-tech discoveries be situated in a genuinely positive anthropological context. Presently no forum can match the uniformly potent moral and pastoral voice of the Catholic Church. As a divinely instituted authority under the guidance and protection of the Holy Spirit, the teachings of the Church exist:  1.)  that its members may be clearly directed, and  2.)  that each nation of the world may be animated to give its citizens what is rightly due to them^[9] as human persons, especially the care and preservation of their lives.

14.  The soundness of our nation depends on the forceful, yet peaceful, pro-active participation of Christian believers. We must articulate the incomparable dignity of man. We must witness to the reality of our profound relationship with the loving Father Who created us and graciously endowed us with the inalienable right to life, a right which admits of no compromise, a right incapable of being transferred, a right impossible to surrender--a right never to be stolen. 

^[1]  Cycle C   /Second Sunday in Ordinary Time   /Isa 62:1-5   /1Cor 12:4-11   /Jn 2:1-12.