partial-birth abortion, embryonic stem cells, and important cultural change about the value of life

From Richard John Neuhaus in First Things...

Remember when, many years ago, the pro-life leadership decided to make a very big issue about partial-birth abortion? Not all pro-lifers agreed. Dissenters said it would distract attention from the main and massive reality of abortions in the early weeks and months of pregnancy, and a ban on partial-birth abortions would save very few, if any, lives. They had a point.

But the intense focus on partial-birth abortion had a different purpose. It was a campaign to educate people about the horror of abortion and to illuminate the patent absurdity of claiming that a fetus with no rights suddenly became a baby with rights when it got its navel through the birth canal. It also educated the public to the fact that the unlimited abortion license decreed by Roe v. Wade was, in fact, unlimited all the way through infanticide.

The campaign against partial-birth abortion was in these ways a great success and contributed immeasurably to creating the circumstance in which a majority of citizens now identify themselves as pro-life.

Consider what has now happened with respect to embryonic stem cell research. As a result of the Thomson/Yamanaka breakthroughs, it is, all of a sudden, respectable to speak about the humanity not only of fetuses on the verge of becoming babies but of the embryo at the very beginning of life. This is an astonishing advance. No longer is it just those pro-life fanatics talking about the humanity of the embryo....The accounts of the pre-Thanksgiving breakthrough in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere evidenced a palpable sigh of relief that a great moral problem had been resolved. For years they had adamantly insisted that there was no moral problem. Now the conventional wisdom is that the moral problem that never was has disappeared.

This is a development of inestimable importance. Yes, some commentators were simply relieved that a difficult issue had been removed from the presidential debate. And yes, some proponents of embryo-destructive stem cell research insisted that it must go ahead, alongside the research path charted by Thomson and Yamanaka. But the great and encouraging consequence of this breakthrough is that the humanity of the unborn child, even at the earliest embryonic stage of development, is now a subject of polite conversation even in the circles that so fanatically resisted acknowledging the facts of life.