The immediate reason for my coming to speak to high school students this time of year is that this January will mark the 25^th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision, Roe vs. Wade, which is the reason why abortion became such a controversial issue in our country.  This was the decision that legalized abortion on demand.  And the Pro-Life Office is going to be sponsoring three buses for high-school aged students to go down to Washington for this March.  I’m sure that you know some students who have gone to the March—there have been several students each year from this school.   But this is the first time that the Diocese itself is going to sponsor buses and organize a trip for high-school aged students to participate in this March, because it’s the 25^th anniversary, a significant and sad milestone.

Obviously my job is to get interested young people to go to this March, and how do you sell the idea of getting on a bus at 10 in the evening and riding through the night, getting out before daylight in the dead of winter, spending the entire day outside—going to some of the official buildings and museums, but for the most part you’re outside, you’re going to walk for about an hour in a huge March, with tens of thousands of people, and then get back on a bus and ride through the night again, and come home in the middle of the night?  It doesn’t sound that attractive, and this is not a trip for sightseeing.  It’s not a pleasure trip.  

I think the only way I could realistically inspire anybody to want to go on this trip, is to talk about what the purpose of this March is, and talk about what unites all of the tens of thousands of people who will be there for this March.

So I’m going to cover Roe vs. Wade—what that decision represents in our country’s history and development.  And then I want to talk a little bit about what value systems are competing for your allegiance in this country.  I’m not exaggerating.  There are two, diametrically opposed value systems in competition—in conflict—in the United States today, and they are trying to win over …  you, your hearts and minds.  The Holy Father refers to these two world views as the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death.  So that’s what I want to do today—talk about Roe vs. Wade and then talk about those two cultures.

You were born after Roe vs. Wade.  So you obviously have no memory at all of what it was like before abortion was a big business and freely available on demand.  But prior to 1973, abortion was a crime in almost every state in the United States of America.  There were about a half-a-dozen states that, during the ‘60s and the very early ‘70s, changed their laws in response to certain ideological movements—people concerned about ‘overpopulation’, people who were are in favor of eugenics (eliminating those with genetic defects), the feminist movement, and advocates of the sexual revolution.  These four ideological strains began agitating to change quite a few of the laws—the divorce laws, laws about marriage, and also, in our country, the laws that prohibited abortion.   And by the end of the ‘60s and very early ‘70s, they had had some very modest success in a handful of states that had legalized abortion in the first two trimesters, the first six months—in Florida, New York, California, Colorado, and one or two others.  That’s it.  Everywhere else in the United States abortion was a kind of crime.  

Now you know that crimes are divided up into different types of crime.  What do you call the crime of going on property where you are not allowed?  Trespass, right?  What is the category of crime that involves taking property that does not belong to you?   What are different names for these sorts of crimes?  Larceny.  Theft.  That is taking property.  Now where do you think in the categories of crimes abortion was classified?  What kind of a crime?  [—Murder?]  No, not technically murder.  What is the general term for crimes of which murder is one particular form?  [—Homicide?]  Homicide, exactly.  It’s not as if people didn’t know what an abortion was.  Everyone understood what it was.  And it was classified as a crime, as a form of homicide.  Not murder—murder needs to be a deliberate, freely chosen, intentional act.  That’s got a technical meaning in the law.  And there is also manslaughter; and there is vehicular homicide.  There are many different forms of taking human life.  And abortion was understood to be one of them.

But the Supreme Court of the United States was composed at that time of seven people, out of nine, who had been very much influenced by those four ideological groups I named before—overpopulation, eugenics, feminism, and the sexual revolution—and when this case came before them, Roe vs. Wade—(of course this case didn’t just come out of the blue; there had been a nationwide campaign by these ideological groups—the American Civil Liberties Union, NOW, Planned Parenthood—they were looking for a good test case; they had many going on across the country), but the first one that got to the Supreme Court was this one from Texas known as Roe vs. Wade.   And in one decision, overnight, seven men sitting on the Supreme Court of the United States interpreted our Constitution to say that, embedded in the Constitution—I always bring a copy, just in case anybody wants to look—somehow embedded in this document is an unfettered right to an abortion—though you can look: the word ‘abortion’ does not occur; the word ‘privacy’ does not occur; the word ‘choice’—it just doesn’t occur.

It was a highly criticized decision at the time by constitutional scholars.  But the effect of that decision was to just erase every single law in all 50 states that prohibited or restricted abortion in any way.  And it’s interesting, they even erased the laws in the most permissive states—California, Colorado, New York, Florida—because those states did not permit abortion in as broad a way as Roe vs. Wade required.  

Now what was the immediate impact of Roe vs. Wade?  I think there are three basic categories of information that I want to get across to you that help you picture what happened after Roe vs. Wade.  Something that had been a crime and considered a form of homicide went overnight from that category to being a constitutionally guaranteed right.  That’s a very radical change.  So three things that help you understand what has happened in our country around the practice of abortion as a result of Roe vs.Wade are: (1) How many abortions are there?   How common has it become?, (2) At what point in pregnancy are abortions typically performed?, and (3) What are the reasons that women have abortions.  If you know those three things then you have a pretty good sense of the actual subject matter of this conflict—how abortion is going on, day in, day out.

So I am going to start with the number of abortions.  The first year abortion was legal (and it was legalized in January, so it was almost a full year) there were 800,000 abortions performed.  By the second year, 1974, there were a million.  By the third year, 1.2 million; and by the fourth year (that would be by the end of 1977), 1.5 million.  And it has stayed at that level ever since, hovering between 1.5 and 1.6 million.   

Now, this is an interesting observation.   What is the ratio between 1.6 million and 800,000?   What fractional part of 1.6 million is 800,000?  It’s half.  Abortion advocates (and I’m very familiar with what they say, because I frequently do debates, and I’ve debated every abortion advocacy group in this state, so I know what they say) one of their claims is that there have always been abortions, a million illegal abortions every year.  They claim that even if abortion is illegal there are going to be just as many desperate women resorting to illegal abortions.  But it is impossible to believe that, because it is very clear from the numbers that, at the very least, legalizing abortion on demand doubled the number of abortions over the span of four years.  That’s what happened; the numbers are there.  And it’s pretty difficult to contend that there were 800,000 illegal abortions in the year prior to abortion becoming an unregulated industry, which did advertising, and was also tax-funded, since immediately Medicaid began picking up the tab for abortions of women who were in low income brackets.  So legalizing abortion on demand at the minimum doubled the number of abortions in our country—more likely quadrupled the number, but we can’t record the number of illegal abortions.

Another way for you to visualize the impact: the abortion rate in Massachusetts is one out of three pregnancies.  So today there will be women who will go to the drugstore, get a home pregnancy test, or go to their doctor’s office, and for every three women, today, who discover they’re pregnant … one is going to have an abortion.  That’s been going on in this state for almost the full 25 years.  So the corollary of that is that if I were to put you in pairs, for each pair of you in this room, there was another human life, conceived the same year you were conceived but did not get born.  And that’s true for every grade—high school, and pre-school, toddlers at home, and the babies that come into the world today in hospitals in Massachusetts.  For each two of them, there was another—that was aborted.

Now at what point in pregnancy are abortions typically performed?  Again, when I do debates—you can take that color brochure [points to a picture in a brochure on fetal development already handed out to each of the students in the audience]—abortion advocates love to look at this picture, a zygote, what a human being looks like in the first 24 hours—abortion advocates will say, “Who can look at that, a one-celled animal, and say, ‘Ah, I recognize there a fellow human being with the same rights and immunities as a grown women’?”  And, I agree, it’s extremely difficult to identify with a one-celled animal.  But that’s irrelevant to the abortion debate, because you cannot do an abortion this early—it is impossible, physically impossible to destroy the developing human life at this point.  The earliest any abortion can be performed, even an abortion using the abortion pill, RU-486—turn to the next page of the brochure—is five weeks after conception.  That’s the absolute earliest abortion.  I agree, I would not call that a baby.   It’s not a baby.  It doesn’t look adorable and cute.  On the other hand, this is what a woman will be told it is a ‘clump of cells’, or ‘pregnancy tissue’, or a ‘product of conception’.  Those are the typical phrases that are used to describe that—even though I think every reasonable person looking at that photograph can say they see a head, an eye, arms, legs, spinal cord.  And you can see that red bulb located in the picture above what will be the thumb is the heart—a heart that has already been beating at this point for two weeks.   That’s true in every abortion.  The heart is already beating.  And in the vast majority of abortions, all you would have to do is lay an electronic stethoscope on the woman’s abdomen, and everybody in the room …  [Ruth starts tapping on the wooden desk at a fast rate approximating an unborn baby’s heartrate] …  would hear  … [she stops speaking for a moment and keeps tapping] … that fetal heartbeat, just a lot faster than an adult’s heartbeat.  But they don’t do that in abortion facilities.  I think you can figure that out.  Why don’t they do that?  They don’t.  They never do.  

Now this would still be an unusually early abortion.  The typical abortion in Massachusetts—you’ve got to turn two pages over in the brochure—is between the 8^th and the 9^th week.  That’s the median gestational age for abortions in Massachusetts.  Which means that half of all the abortions done in our state, which would be about 15,000 per year, are done between this point [Ruth points to the picture of the 5-week old fetus] and this point [she points to the about 9-week old fetus].  But of course that means that the other half are done after this point [9 weeks] in pregnancy.  And again abortion advocates would love for everyone to continue to believe that abortions are only performed—what?—before there are any recognizable human features, just unformed tissue.  But that is simply not true.  No abortions are performed that early.  And in fact half of the abortions in this state take place after the 9^th week of pregnancy.

Now most Americans remain very unaware and oblivious to how routinely late abortions are performed. And what astonishes me is that it’s not as though you’ve got to go dig this information out of medical archives or anything.  All you need to do is look in the Yellow Pages [Ruth holds up a page torn from the Yellow Pages].  You will see, next to all the tiny, modest ads for other businesses, like dry cleaning, sales and services, deposits, accessories—there are these big, very expensive ads, for abortion clinics.  And right in the Yellow Pages it says: “Reasonable fees.  Most health insurance accepted.  Evening hours. Prompt  appointments.  Mastercard and Visa accepted.  Abortion to 22 weeks.”  In the Yellow Pages.

Now this is what a developing human looks like 18 weeks after conception.  [She holds up a plastic model of what appears to be a small baby.]  This is life-size and anatomically correct.  And in the Yellow Pages they advertise that if you’ve got your Mastercard or Visa, you can walk in off the street, and if you can pay for it, they will destroy this.   You don’t need a doctor’s note.  You don’t have to prove that your health will be jeopardized, or anything.  It’s just—you want an abortion; you can pay for an abortion; and a full four weeks, a month further along in pregnancy than this [Ruth continues to hold up the model], they will just destroy this.  This is what will be described as ‘a clump of cells’ … ‘pregnancy tissue’ … ‘a product of conception’.  

I even brought the “Informed Consent Form” used by the State of Massachusetts, where all that is said about this is that ‘the contents of the uterus will be evacuated’.  That’s what this is [Ruth again holds up the model], ‘contents of the uterus’.  Now of course abortion is legal and performed even later than the 22 week point.

You have heard by now of ‘partial birth abortion’?  This is the debate that’s raging in Congress.  Twice our Congress has passed a law to ban a particularly barbaric method of doing a late abortion, and President Clinton, who is very much in favor of abortion on demand, has vetoed this.  The paper that began this whole debate was given by the doctor, Dr. Martin Haskell, who developed this technique of doing abortions.  And he explained why he developed the technique, and at what point in pregnancy this technique can be used.  If any of you doubt me, you can come and look at the photocopy [Ruth gestures to the document she is holding in her hand].  He says right at the opening of the paper that he routinely uses this technique in women 20-26 weeks pregnant.  (Let’s see, 26 weeks, and four weeks to a month, so that’s 6 ½ months.)  But then towards the end, he says, he’s familiar with another surgeon, using a ‘conceptually similar technique’, who performs these procedures up to … ‘32 weeks or more’.  It says it right there in black and white.  What’s term, does anybody know?   Any mothers or aunts or cousins who have had babies, when everybody’s counting the weeks?  The baby comes on the due date, and how many weeks is that?  Right, it’s forty.   So ‘32 weeks or more’ means the 7^th or 8^th month of pregnancy, when this technique is used.  

This is a paper that was given at a convention.  You know how insurance salesmen go to conventions, dentists go to conventions, …  and abortionists go to conventions.  This was held in Dallas, September 13^th to 14^th, 1992, and it was hosted by the National Abortion Federation.  This was where Dr. Martin Haskell got up and gave his paper about how to do a partial birth abortion.  And right here in public—it’s written in this article—it’s said that this is used into the 7^th or 8^th month of pregnancy.  

All right.  Enough of that.  You know how many abortions there are; you know at what point in pregnancy they are typically performed; and the final little piece of the jigsaw puzzle: Why, why do so many women choose abortion?

Again, I have heard abortion advocates, and I know what they use in their rhetoric, in their advertising, and in their PR.  They focus on women who are victims of rape and incest.  Women for whom pregnancy poses a serious risk to their physical health.   And women who are carrying children who are known to be handicapped.—But now they’ve changed a little.  They don’t even just say ‘handicapped’, because it’s not PC to be in favor of killing handicapped people anymore.  So they say ‘children with profound handicaps who are certain to die’.  And who would not feel sorry for a woman in that circumstance, who is carrying a child, and she is going to go through labor and birth knowing that the child is going to die?  And similarly victims of rape and incest, and women who are really risking their physical health being pregnant.  I think everybody in this room would say that we all feel a lot of sympathy for women in those circumstances.  But it is a realistic question to ask, “Okay, how many of the 1.55 million abortions done every year are actually done for those reasons?”

Now I know from dealing with the media, dealing with the public, that nobody believes pro-lifers.  Why should they?   We’re supposed to be irrational fanatics.  So I don’t ever tell you things that come from pro-life sources.  I brought with me the photocopy of an article.  It appeared in Family Planning Perspectives, which is the research journal put out by Planned Parenthood.  Planned Parenthood operates the largest chain of abortion facilities in the United States, and they are also the biggest funders of pro-abortion advocacy and lobbying in the United States.  So this is not pro-life propaganda.  This is a research paper: they handed out questionnaires all across the country; they got a very good, very representative sample of women that were having abortions, who filled out this questionnaire in the abortion facility.   The question was: What is the principal reason you are having this abortion?  And I am going to read to you the top six reasons, given by the women themselves, why the woman was having an abortion.  If you add up all the percentages, it comes to about 90% of all the abortions done in the United States.  And these are the reasons:  “I can’t afford a baby now”; “I’m not ready for the responsibility”; “I’m concerned about how having a baby could change my life”; “I have problems with this relationship and want to avoid single motherhood”; “I’m not mature enough to have a child”; “I already have as many children as I want”.  

Now, again, without being harsh or judgmental—I’m sure a lot of these women were in extremely difficult circumstances—but, I think we can all agree these are a far cry from women who are victims of rape or incest; women who are going to jeopardize their physical health; or women who are carrying a profoundly handicapped child.  How many of the women in this questionnaire said, “I was a victim or rape (or incest); “My health is threatened”; “This child is fatally handicapped”?  If you add up the women who said that, it comes to less than 3% of the 1.55 million abortions done each year in this country.  

Now that’s really significant, because  …  this was a headline, in the Boston Globe [holds up a newspaper], back in 1989, which was a very startling headline.  (One of the members of the Board of Directors of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, which is the pro-life lobbying group in Massachusetts, had a friend who worked for the Globe and heard the editorial staff shouting at them the night they were trying to decide how to print this headline, because the headline did not come out the way they wanted it.)  They had commissioned a poll, a public opinion survey, with WBZ-TV, about what Americans think  about abortion, and, of course, don’t we all know that we are the most pro-choice state in the union, and the vast majority of people are pro-choice, and favor a woman’s ‘right to choose’?  But the headline says, “Most in U.S. favor ban on majority of abortions.”  How is that possible?  Well, if you look carefully at their pie charts and everything, what you find out is that if you ask people detailed questions like this, “Do you think all abortions should be illegal?”; “Do you think all abortions should be illegal except those to save the life of the mother?”; “Do you think all abortions should be illegal except those to save the life of the mother and those of women who were victims of rape and incest?”   What you find is that if you keep going until you get to, “Do you think you should have our current policy, which is abortion on demand?”, about 52 or 53% of Americans believe that abortions should only be legal for the ‘hard cases’—those ones that I just cited.  So basically, if we could make laws—which we can’t, because once the Supreme Court rules, you can only go against what the Supreme Court says if you pass a constitutional amendment, which is very difficult, or if the Supreme Court itself sees fit to change its mind, which does happen but takes a long time—so we cannot pass laws that actually reflect what the majority of Americans believe.   What the majority of Americans believe is that abortion should only be legal for the 3% of the abortions that are actually going on, day in and day out in this country.  

Now, I think at this point—I could go on and on—you’ve got a clear sense how abortion became legal, how many there are, at what point in pregnancy they really are done and are legal, and what are the reasons that are driving women to this.   A lot them are just plain old socio-economic reasons.  You could solve a lot of these problems in ways that are a lot less drastic and final than taking the life of the unborn child.  

Now I want to try very vividly to impress upon you what are the two value systems competing for your allegiance.   The first is the pro-life position, which I think is pretty obvious.—No, it’s not obvious, because of the way that the media always portrays people like myself.  I am a pro-life activist; I have been doing this for a decade; a lot of my free time goes to trying to teach people and persuade them to be pro-life.  Now what is it that motivates me?  The media portrayal of people like me is that we are religious fanatics, just going around trying to make everyone be whatever religion we are, or that we are against equal rights for women—which I always think is a joke, because if I were against equal rights for women, what would I be doing with a job, and out in the public sphere, getting involved in politics and public policy debates?   And I don’t know a single pro-lifer who is motivated because we don’t think women are equal to men, or don’t believe in equal access to education or professional training, political life, and everything.   

What motivates us is something that is very simple.   We just really do believe that all human beings are equal.  All human beings are equal.   What could that possibly mean?—because, as you well know, all of us are not equally smart, equally athletic, equally good-looking, equally proficient, equally nice.  We’re not equal in any of those categories.  But we are equal in our essential dignity as human beings.   And that means everybody, not just the ones you like, or the ones that look like you, or talk your language.   It means every single member of the human race has this innate human dignity.   It doesn’t matter how old they are, healthy, sick, poor—we just don’t care.   If you are human, then you have this basic equality.  

Now, what is the thing in the womb of a pregnant woman?  It is absurd to deny that it is alive.   You’ve taken 9^th grade biology—right?—you know what a living thing is.    If I put this zygote down in a petri dish, and it was a biology final, and I said, “Tell me, is this inanimate matter—minerals, rocks, dirt, stuff.  Inanimate matter—or is it organic matter?  And if it’s organic matter (which you can all clearly see), is it alive, or is it dead?  Or is it some ‘tissue culture’ from a living thing?”  Okay, if it’s in the womb and it’s swimming around, and it’s got a little heart beating, and it’s sucking its thumb—obviously it’s not dead.   Equally obviously it’s not some kind of tissue culture.  It’s not like you took some of the woman’s brain cells and grew them in a petri dish.  They’re not cells from her body.  It’s some kind of little living animal.  Okay, that’s just a scientific fact.  It’s alive in the sense in which a biologist would use that word.  

Okay, it’s alive.  What species is it?  It’s not like we don’t know what species it is.   It’s not some unknown species—if it were, you could get a Nobel Prize naming it, right?   No, it belongs to the species Homo sapiens.  Everyone knows that.   It’s living and it’s human.  

You believe that human beings are all fundamentally equal.   There is a living human for you.

Now, that’s a nice, neat philosophical argument, but what is more important to understand is what people who advocate abortion really believe on this.  And I’m going to read an example so that you get the point—what differentiates those who take the pro-life position from those who accept abortion.  

The one I’m going to read comes from this interesting book, In Necessity and Sorrow: Life and Death in an Abortion Hospital, by this woman—this picture was taken 30 years ago, by now she’s gray and wrinkled—but, Magda Denes.  She’s a clinical psychologist.  She opens up her book saying “I am pro-choice.  I am in favor or unrestricted abortion through all nine months, tax-funded.”  But unlike a lot of abortion advocates, she’s a very honest woman, which I admire.  She’s very plain-speaking.  She felt that, as a clinical psychologist, she ought to go to an abortion facility and witness—how is it done?  How does it affect people?   She talked to everybody involved with it—the doctors, the nurses, the counselors, the women having abortions, everybody who came with them—and this book is a collection of her observations and her interviews.  She wanted people to see the real emotional turmoil around this issue.  And as part of her honesty as an abortion advocate she thought she ought to witness an abortion and describe it.  So I’m going to read to you her description of an abortion that took place—if you look at that brochure that describes Mass. Citizens for Life, with the picture of the earth and the moon, and you turn to the back panel, there’s a picture of a child at 14 weeks after conception—that’s the same gestational age as the abortion she witnessed.  And I’m going to read to you how she describes an abortion.  

“The person doing the abortion is Dr. Holzman.  There was a nurse in the room, a man, who was named Mr. Smith, and the woman having the abortion is under general anesthesia.”—Ask yourself, would they have spoken like this if she were under local anesthesia, if she could hear every word?  I don’t think so.—“Dr. Holzman pulls out something which he slaps on the instrument table.  ‘There’, he says, ‘a leg.’  I turn to Mr. Smith, ‘What did he say?’  ‘He pulled a leg off’, Mr. Smith says, ‘over here.’  He points to the instrument table where there is a perfectly formed, slightly bent leg, about three inches long.   ‘I have the rib cage now,’ Holzman says, as he slams down another piece on the table.  ‘There, I’ve got the head out now.’  I look at the instrument table where next to the leg there lies a head.   It is the smallest human head I have ever seen, but it is unmistakably part of a person.”

Now, I obviously want to get across the anatomical details.  Because the way people talk about abortion you would think there is nothing there, and that it just sort of dissolves and goes away.   But that’s not true.  That slogan, “Get laws off of my body”—my body, my choice—these slogans are drawing your attention away from the fact that there is another life, and that there are body parts in an abortion.  That’s just a fact that cannot be avoided, if you are going to be honest.  

But that’s not what’s really so disturbing.  What is really disturbing is her last phrase, “unmistakably part of a person.”  Because here is a person who has just told you that she supports abortion, but she understands it to be the deliberate dismembering of a helpless and innocent human person.  And I could go on.  I make a point of collecting quotes like this.   There are dozens and dozens of them.  Abortion advocates—people who are like me, only, they are on the other side—they’re well informed on this issue.  They know perfectly well that abortion is the taking of a human life.  There is no doubt.  There is no doubt on that question.   And that’s the big divide, and those are the two cultures competing for you.   And you have to choose.  It would be lovely if you didn’t have to choose, but you do.   You have to choose whether you are going to take the stand, that, no matter how serious the problems, no matter how burdensome, no matter how problematic, we will not take innocent human life to solve problems.   We won’t take human life, deliberately, to solve problems—that would be what the death penalty is about.   The other side says, “Yeah, we may not like it.  We wish it wouldn’t happen.  But, under some circumstances, we take human life to solve problems.”  That’s the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death.  And you live in a country where 4000 innocent lives are being killed by abortion every day.  So merely by doing nothing you are in fact sort of taking a side.  You’re saying, “Oh, I wish that weren’t happening.  I don’t like it.  I wouldn’t have an abortion myself.  But isn’t it too bad—4000 innocent human lives are snuffed out every day in my country.”