- I am very honored to receive
the March for Life Lifetime Achievement Award
and to have the opportunity to speak to you
about this great cause.
My pro-life commitment began over 50 years ago
when I was a college student.
Back then the abortion lobby was already well-advanced.
It was supported by the American Law Institute,
the American Medical Association,
the American Public Health Association,
the Rockefeller Commission on Population
and the American Future,
and of course, the New York Times,
to just give a few examples.
When Roe . Wade was decided,
I was in law school and I thought Yale professor,
John Hart Ely had it just right.
The decision wasn't just bad, as he wrote,
"It is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense
of an obligation to try to be."
In 1976, I came to Washington DC,
the abortion lobby strategy
during these early years was simple.
Having won a sweeping victory in the Supreme Court,
a decision supported by the elite institutions
and media influencers of the day,
it was to engage Congress in lengthy committee hearings
to show the impossibility
of passing a constitutional amendment
and then wait for public opposition to fade away.
But two brilliant decisions denied that strategy success.
The first was made by an obscure government attorney
named, Nellie Gray.
She bravely launched an annual March for Life in Washington,
and then she devoted the rest of her life to its success.
The second decision was by a freshmen congressmen
from Illinois,
who introduced an amendment
to stop the use of federal tax dollars to pay for abortions.
Like Nellie Gray,
Henry Hyde would devote the rest of his public life
to the pro-life cause.
I was privileged to work closely with both of these giants.
The annual March for Life in Washington
and the annual Hyde Amendment Debate in Congress
assured that the pro-life cause would not fade away,
but instead would grow in national importance.
Then our efforts reached new heights
with the election of president Ronald Reagan.
At the Department of health and Human Services,
where I was counselor to the undersecretary,
we were able to establish legal protections
for handicap newborn infants,
who at that time were being left to die.
When I joined his white house staff,
I helped prepare the annual meeting between the president
and pro-life leaders
held every year during the March for Life.
As a result of one of those meetings,
we were able to advance Nellie's great hope
to bring the protections of the Hyde Amendment
to the district of Columbia.
We also developed and implemented
president Reagan's Mexico City policy.
That policy stopped American foreign aid dollars
from being used to promote abortion overseas
and it also changed our government's diplomacy
with the United Nations,
which had sponsored the Mexico City meeting
to promote population control.
And throughout all these years,
president Reagan provided a clear
and consistent presidential voice
defending the rights of the unborn.
Often in his State of the Union addresses
as well as in his remarks to the March for Life.
We've accomplished much since that time.
These are just a few examples of how far we've come
through the dedicated action of so many.
Many of whom are no longer with us,
but I am always aware of their presence
and the power of their prayers.
All of us have our own reason
why we are part of this great pro-life cause.
For me, it's best summed up by the saying,
"Whoever saves one life, saves the world."
Now I would like to speak about four principles,
which are foundational to our success.
The first is our commitment to justice.
Since the day Moses returned from Mount Sinai,
we've known that it is always wrong
to intentionally kill an innocent human being.
As Americans, we understand that this idea
is at the heart of justice and our entire justice system.
Because a government that will sanction
the killing of the innocent
is capable of sanctioning anything.
And it matters little that this sanction is camouflaged
in the language of freedom.
As the Russian novelist Dostoevsky reminds us,
"If one begins with unlimited freedom,
one will end up with unlimited despotism."
Justice is both the process and the principle
by which we give to each person
that to which he is entitled.
What is due to a person may differ
based on his age or his condition of dependency.
A 12 year old child may not have the right to vote,
or to sign contracts, or to obtain a driver's license,
but that does not mean he may be tortured, or killed,
or sold into slavery.
But the Supreme Court reached precisely
this result in Roe v. Wade,
saying that the unborn child
has never been recognized in law
as a person in the whole sense.
The court then went on to act
as though the unborn child has no rights at all.
This approach is essentially incoherent.
The fact that a human being's age
does not entitle him to all rights,
does not mean that he has no rights.
Instead, it should lead us to ask
a more fundamental question.
What are the rights every human being is entitled to,
simply by the fact that he is a human being
with a human nature?
The answer to that question is clear.
We must all have the basic right to life,
a right enumerated in the language
of both the 5th and 14th Amendments to our constitution.
Instead, the Supreme Court fashioned a right of privacy,
relying on its earlier decision
and Griswold versus Connecticut.
In that case, the court held that the guarantees
of the Bill of Rights have quote,
"Penumbras formed by emanations
from those guarantees,"
and the right to abortion is to be found not
in the text of the constitution itself,
but in a penumbra.
But a penumbra is not a legal principle,
it is simply another word for shadow.
So we are asked to believe
that what had for years been regarded
as simply a legal metaphor
suddenly has its own legal reality,
and that within these shadows
can be found new constitutional rights.
Ironically, this has put forward as a method of interpreting
a constitution of enumerated rights.
Read these opinions for yourself
and see if you do not come to the conclusion
that this type of manipulation is precisely
what the framers of our constitution
sought to protect us against
in giving us a constitution of enumerated rights.
Then see if you don't agree with justice, Byron White,
when he described the decision in Roe versus Wade
as quote,
"An exercise in raw judicial power."
This leads to what I believe
to be the second great principle of the pro-life cause.
The insistence that our governmental institutions
must tell us the truth.
Roe v. Wade fails this test as well.
The Supreme Court said it did not need
to resolve the question of when human life begins,
then it went on to act as though human life
only begins at birth.
Now falsehoods and misstatements
of history riddle the court's opinion,
but this one is the worst.
If courts refuse to recognize and respect
the reality of the objects in the case before them,
then justice becomes impossible.
Since it is impossible to know
that to which the parties in the case are entitled.
We are told that Roe v. Wade is a decision
that respects women,
but respect for women means telling them the truth,
and not lying to them.
Consider the photographs that the Swedish photographer,
Lennart Nilsson published in 1965.
I had the opportunity to place his photographs
on the desk of every Senator in the Senate Chamber
during an early vote on the Hyde Amendment.
Modern ultrasound technology
confirms in an extraordinary way what we knew in 1973,
and even long before.
Ultrasounds allow every mother
to experience the living reality of her child.
And every time a mother chooses
to save the life of her child,
she saves not one world, but two.
By denying what everyone knows to be true
that the unborn child is a living human being,
Roe v. Wade rests upon the greatest legal falsehood
since the court's terrible decision,
upholding the fiction of separate
but equal racial segregation
in Plessy versus Ferguson.
Having fought a great Civil War,
our nation adopted the 14th Amendment
to provide for the equal protection of the laws.
Then a sizable part of the nation,
having agreed to this principle,
subverted it by a sleight of hand.
Insisting it would enforce this guarantee
by the policy of separate but equal protection of the laws,
a policy that everyone knew to be false,
but it was upheld by the Supreme Court.
That decision stood as settled law
for more than half a century,
its supporters could claim
that the country actually had relied upon it.
After all, a segregated American army
had won two World Wars
and its commanders in chief
had been chosen by a political party
that was racially segregated.
Yet, at what might have seemed to be the height
of its political power, the tide began to turn against it.
There's an important lesson here and it is this,
no matter how entrenched,
no matter its claim to stability,
in America, no unjust law is sustainable.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was right,
"The arc of history may be long,
but it bends towards justice."
This brings me to the third great principle
and that is our commitment to democracy.
The progress we have made, and it has been substantial,
has been achieved through the exercise
of our constitutional rights
to peaceably assemble and to petition our elected officials.
We have confidence in our democratic institutions
and that the executive, legislative,
and judicial branches will ultimately do what is right.
Political tides, ebb and flow,
it is a mistake to judge the strength
or direction of the current by one moment in time.
There is a consistent, strong consensus in America
to significantly restrict abortion.
To recognize this reality
does not mean we advocate a majority may decide
what is morally right or just,
but it does mean that after nearly 50 years,
Roe v. Wade and its supporters have failed
to convince the American people that the decision
is something other than an exercise of raw judicial power,
and it shows that Roe v. Wade is not settled law.
This brings me to our fourth principle,
the hallmark of the pro-life cause
is compassion and generosity.
We see every day,
how pro-life Americans reach out to help others.
There is something distinctly American
about this care for a neighbor.
In an earlier time,
we might have described it as a special sense of family.
Today, we are more likely to use a word like solidarity
or accompaniment,
but whatever term we may use, it is a commitment
to regard a stranger more like a neighbor
and a neighbor more like a sister or brother.
I have seen this so often
in pro-life pregnancy counseling centers
and in programs helping women suffering
from post-abortion trauma.
The strength to offer a helping hand
and the courage to love another,
especially when that person is in need
is often hidden from public view,
but it is nonetheless very real.
A culture of compassion and love
quietly permeates the pro-life cause,
it is the wellspring from which all else flows.
The great 19th century, American Catholic intellectual,
Orestes Brownson, once observed, every great nation
has its special work, mission, or destiny.
Writing several years later,
the Russian Orthodox theologian,
Vladimir Solovyov put it differently.
He observed the idea of a nation
is not what it thinks of itself in time,
but instead what God thinks of it in eternity.
I think both are guideposts for us in the days ahead.
What is that special work for each of us and for our nation?
And how will that both stand the test of time
and eternity?
The steadfast protection of a weak, defenseless,
and innocent child surely meets those tests.
So does the commitment
to justice, truth, democracy, and compassion.
President Ronald Reagan once encouraged us
not to tire on what he called the long March for Life.
From the first March for Life to this one,
every one of us has understood what Reverend King meant
by the arc of history.
We understand that it bends
when people like you and me bend it,
bend it toward justice, toward compassion, toward life.
And what is more, each of us way back from the beginning
of the pro-life movement
has known we are on a lifetime's journey.
The direction of that journey does not bend,
it does not waiver, though sometimes it may slow down.
But in the end, our pro-life journey has a destination,
and that my friends is victory.