For Reagan, All Life Was Sacred.(Ronald Reagan)

Editor's note. The following first appeared in the New York Times and is reprinted with the author's permission. William P. Clark was national security adviser and secretary of the interior under President Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan had not passed from this life for 48 hours before proponents of human embryonic stem cell research began to suggest that such ethically questionable scientific work should be promoted under his name. But this cannot honestly be done without ignoring President Reagan's own words and actions. Ronald Reagan's record reveals that no issue was of greater importance to him than the dignity and sanctity of all human life. "My administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land," he said in 1983. "And there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning." One of the things he regretted most at the completion of his presidency in 1989, he told me, was that politics and circumstances had prevented him from making more progress in restoring protection for unborn human life.

Still, he did what he could. To criticize the Roe v. Wade decision on its 10th anniversary in 1983, he published his famous essay "Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation" in The Human Life Review. "We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life - - the unborn - - without diminishing the value of all human life," he wrote. He went on to emphasize "the truth of human dignity under God" and "respect for the sacred value of human life.'' Because modern science has revealed the wonder of human development, and modern medicine treats "the developing human as a patient,'' he declared, "the real question today is not when human life begins, but, What is the value of human life?"

In that essay, he expressly encouraged continued support for the "sanctity of life ethic" and rejection of the "quality of life ethic." Writing about the value of all human life, he quoted the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge's statement that "however low it flickers or fiercely burns, it is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives ever so humane and enlightened." And in the Roe v. Wade decision, he insisted, the Supreme Court "did not explicitly reject the traditional American idea of intrinsic worth and value in all human life; it simply ...