The Abortion Thaw The Truth Is Abortion's Enemy.

Editor's note. This first appeared on National Review Online and is reprinted with the author's permission.

Not until he became governor and faced a bill on his desk did Ronald Reagan ever think much about abortion, he tells us in his new book, and then he boiled his queries down to one commonsense question. Tell me what would happen, he asked his lawyer friends, if a man died, leaving his estate half to his pregnant wife and half to the child in her womb. If the wife then procured an abortion so that she could keep the estate for herself, would that be murder for financial gain? Nobody wanted to answer that.

The law protects the unborn child in two or three important areas, Reagan concluded, including inheritance laws and laws against the abuse of pregnant women that causes the death of the unborn child. That gave Reagan the foundation for his view that, in the general case, the unborn deserve the protection of their lives. They are human individuals and have long been so treated by the law. They have rights to be protected.

Reagan's radio address upon this subject should be read in full; it is a marvelous record of how one man faced his own puzzlement and made up his mind. It may be found in Reagan: In His Own Words, just published by the Hoover Institution Press. It was reprinted recently in the New York Times Magazine (Dec. 31, 2000). It is one of the advance scripts for Reagan's radio show, drafted and corrected in his own hand.

This text appears just in time to prepare us for today's great March for Life, on the 28th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, to mourn the deaths of 40 million citizens ripped untimely from the womb, and to pray God to bless this nation with a more civilized and benign moral practice.

The 40 million dead represent almost exactly the number of young workers needed to fend off the immense crisis of unsustainable Social Security burdens. With every year that passes, not enough younger people are working to finance the retirement of the older. The young workers have been winnowed out. Their cohort is lacking 40 million.

The oldest of those now dead would be in their 27th year. Each year now, there would be another 1.4 million of them turning six and entering first grade, and an equal number graduating into the work force from high school or college. But they are absent.