Roe v. Wade @ 36
The Supreme Court intended Roe v. Wade to "settle" the abortion debate. Abortion would finally be accepted as a permanent and necessary right of a modern progressive society. Baby Boomers are still split with 51% believing abortion to be morally wrong according to a recent poll. But, what about younger generations. Surely they are more progressive than their parents or even grandparents?
Apparently not. 60% of "millenials" and "gen-Xers" find abortion to be morally wrong, putting them in line with their grandparents and great-grandparents 65 and older.
What's going on here? Have young people found religion? Have they embraced the religious Right's pro-life views? Perhaps . . . but perhaps it has more to do with technology?
"Mugged by Ultrasound" in the Weekly Standard explores exactly this phenomena:
Other converts were driven into the pro-life movement by advances in ultrasound technology. The most recent example is Abby Johnson, the former director of Dallas-area Planned Parenthood. After watching, via ultrasound, an embryo “crumple” as it was suctioned out of its mother’s womb, Johnson reported a “conversion in my heart.” Likewise, Joan Appleton was the head nurse at a large abortion facility in Falls Church, Virginia, and a NOW activist. Appleton performed thousands of abortions with aplomb until a single ultrasound-assisted abortion rattled her. As Appleton remembers, “I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. . . . After the procedure I was shaking, literally.”
The most famous abortion provider to be converted by ultrasound technology, decades ago, is Bernard Nathanson, cofounder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, the original NARAL. In the early 1970s, Nathanson was the largest abortion provider in the Western world. By his own reckoning he performed more than 60,000 abortions, including one on his own child. Nathanson’s exit from the industry was slow and tortured. In Aborting America (1979), he expressed anxiety over the possibility that he was complicit in a great evil. He was especially troubled by ultrasound images. When he finally left his profession for pro-life activism, he produced The Silent Scream (1984), a documentary of an ultrasound abortion that showed the fetus scrambling vainly to escape dismemberment.
I don't think an increasing incidence of faith is to blame for young people's increasingly pro-life attitudes. In this case, it is an increasing contact with reality and the facts of abortion. It would seem to be only a matter of time before America rejects its liberal abortion license. But, that will not come in time to save the unborn children already killed or the ones still to be killed.
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