The Mythology of "Choice".

When you put in the kind of hours that pro-lifers routinely do, it's not surprising that periodically your mind wanders off into contemplating "what-ifs." My favorite first floated through the canyons of my mind back in the early 1980s.

What are the absolutely indispensable linchpins that undergird the reign of Roe? Put another way, what pilings hold up the abortion superstructure, the removal of which could seriously threaten the collapse of abortion on demand?

Everyone has his or her own list. If we ignore for the purposes of this discussion seismic changes in the wider culture, we naturally focus on the mother and her unborn child. Let's take the child first.

What would be the aftershock if we were ever able to get it across to ordinary people that abortion hurts an unborn child -- that he or she suffers horribly beginning at some point at pregnancy. Neurologist Dr. Paul Ranalli, writing in NRL News, has observed, "Careful anatomical studies reveal, in fact, that the ascending pain fibers reach the cortex by 20 weeks. ... Allowing some room for individual variability, the brain of an unborn child will begin to register pain impulses just after 20 weeks, with ever-increasing amounts of pain reception reaching millions of surface cortical neurons between 20 and 24 weeks."

What if that became common knowledge? At the same time Americans are watching ads on their television sets for four-dimensional ultrasounds that produce images of unborn babies nearly as good as photographs?

What about their moms? We've talked for years about the physical and psychological aftermath that leaves many women floating aimlessly about like survivors on a life raft. As we've written extensively in recent issues, well-respected organizations are beginning to assemble in one place all the disparate evidence demonstrating beyond a quibble that abortion hurts an unknown but considerable percentage of women. (See page three.)

But what if, in addition to all that, the conventional wisdom about "choice" got turned on its head? That the gauzy, warm picture of autonomous women freely choosing to abort were replaced with the dark, brutal truth that very often women are coerced into killing their babies in a manner that resembles something we've come to associate with China's savage one-child-per-family, forced-abortion regime?