In 1973, as Roe v. Wade was being decided by the Supreme Court, opponents argued that the danger was that the legalization of abortion was the first step of a slippery slope that would lead to much more drastic issues like forced euthanasia. Proponents of Roe, denied the slippery slope argument.
Who was right? Is there a slippery slope in regards to the cheapening of life?
It's 2005. We can look back now and evaluate that argument. Time for the score card.
In 1973 what was legalized was limited abortion rights. Permissable in the first term. Limited in the second trimester. Outlawed in the third.
In 2005 abortion is hardly even the issue any more. Those limitations have eroded to the point of irrelevancy. Late term abortion is no longer even rare. Down the slope we've gone. 1.5 million abortions a year. Yawn, says the country. Get current. We have abortion rights and millions of people want more. We want the "right to die". We want assisted suicide. We want to create embryos to destroy them for research to find cures. Let's have Stem Cell Research right now! - and if you oppose it you're just a religious fanatic. Get out of our way!
And yet, millions still deny the slippery slope.
One of the turning points in my life that contributed to my conversion to a pro-life stance was reading a quiet little book written by a doctor. It wasn't a book about abortion. It was essentially a social studies book written by a man named Robert Jay Lifton, who was a doctor. Being a doctor, Lifton was fascinated by a simple question. The question was: how could doctors - who probably took an oath to do no wrong - become the designers and implementers of the Holocaust? Yes, the Nazis dreamed up the death camps and the "final solution", but doctors made it happen. From selecting the victims, to the mechanisms of death like the gas chamber, to disposing of the corpses it took doctors to implement. Why did they participate?
A good question. And a fascinating one.
The answer, of course, was the slippery slope. The doctors didn't start out fitting showers with deadly gas in the camps. They started with the more benign issue of sterilizing the mentally retarded. From their they graduated down the slope to euthansia of those who were "life unworthy of life". The doctors made the killing of millions in death camps feasible.
It was an excellent book and it had a profound impact on my thinking on these issues. You can read more about it (here).
I'm not making any comparisons here of anyone involved in any of the current issues in the United States to Nazis. I'm not. That would be totally irresponsible.
But I am saying that there are valid historical lessons here for us to learn as we struggle in this country with the right-to-life issues of abortion, Stem Cell Research, and the end-of-life issues like we are dealing with this week as we have the public spectacle of the end of Terri Schiavo's life.
And I am saying that we are well down the slippery slope of the cheapening of life.
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