Posted on January 31, 2007

by

Daniel Clark

While there remains no end in sight to legalized abortion, the annual March for Life continues to illustrate one trend that ought to alarm the pro-abortion movement. Not only have the crowds at the march grown dramatically larger over the past ten years, but they have grown just as significantly younger.

Whereas the March for Life has become increasingly populated by people in their twenties and teens, most of the participants in the NOW rally held that same day have probably got pet rocks older than that. At an anti-abortion event, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting somebody under thirty. At a pro-abortion event, they count the dead cat among the participants.

This runs counter to the conventional wisdom. Considering that polls consistently say America is equally divided on the issue, that the pop media support abortion overwhelmingly, and that there are obvious motives for young people to be pro-abortion, one might expect abortion advocates to have a virtual monopoly on America's youth. That analysis, however, would ignore the natural conflict that exists between Roe v. Wade and those who have been born since that ruling was handed down.

By sanctioning the killing of the "unwanted" human unborn, the Supreme Court, and all who have defended its decision, have determined that a new human being no longer has any inherent, objective value. Rather, it has only what value is subjectively assigned to it by others. If you haven't been born yet, and your mother doesn't want you, then you're worth nothing. The fact that she's not allowed to kill you after bringing you home from the hospital is due only to the fact that you're valued by society. Your value still isn't inherent to you; it's merely a social construct.

This was illustrated by the very necessity of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which President Bush signed in 2002. Before this law was enacted, babies who had survived abortions were allowed to die of neglect while the authorities did nothing. The fact that these children had been born, and were therefore not only people but American citizens, did not force society to recognize their inherent value. The point was that they were still unwanted, and that they had not been assigned any social identities. Therefore, they were valued no more than when they were still inside their mothers.

Jesse Jackson used to encourage children to recite the words, "I am somebody." Since he has flip-flopped on the abortion issue, the message that he and like-minded liberals have for post-Roe children is that they aren't anybody, until someone else says they are.

The same was not true of the feminists who fought to legalize abortion. Before they were born, they were already protected by the inherent value of their humanity. Their mothers were not empowered to deprive them of it, on the basis that they were "unwanted." Ironically, it was they, the liberal activists of the "Me Generation," who had rebelled against their parents, and called them hypocrites. The last proposition they'd ever accept was that their parents had the right to decide whether or not they had any value.

It's no wonder, then, that so few post-Roe children will march alongside, and so many will march against, those pre-Roe activists who had deemed them expendable. Who are those rancid feminist relics to decide that America's youth have no value, other than that which is bestowed upon them by their benevolent elders? Who are those celebrity has-beens and never-wuzzes to say that the young have no right to life, unless they are wanted?

It cannot be lost on the post-Roe generation that the pro-abortion leaders who try to recruit them are old enough to be their parents, which also makes them old enough to have been their executioners. It must be exceedingly difficult to swallow a slogan like "Pro-Child, Pro-Choice" if you were a child who was eligible to have been "chosen."

Abortion advocates like to say that young people are the beneficiaries of their activism, when really, they're the survivors of it. About one in every four is killed by abortion. The expectation that the other three will thank the accessories to the killing is nothing short of perverse.

Much of the pre-Roe activists' rhetoric is so outrageous that it's doubtful they even believe it themselves. This is especially true anytime they pretend to act on behalf of somebody else. If they ever said what they really think, they'd simply amended Rev. Jackson's declaration to say, "I am somebody; you, I'm not so sure about."

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