Another Country

July 12, 2000

Volume 2/ Number 14

Dear Friend and Colleague:

Stenberg vs. Carhart is a most horrendous decision, defying all manner of logic and decency. There was a time when such decisions only happened in countries ruled by oppressive, Godless regimes.

Steven W. Mosher

President

Another Country

Twenty years ago I was an eyewitness to forced abortions and infanticide in China. I saw young women five, seven, and even nine months pregnant coerced into operating rooms where, by means of lethal injection and the physical dismemberment of their now dead infants in utero, they were stripped of their babies. Young women who went into labor before they could be aborted had their infants killed at birth, again by lethal injection.

I was shocked by these crimes, quite rightly, and set about trying to call attention to the plight of women and children in China. I wrote books like A Mother’s Ordeal: One Woman’s Fight Against China’s One-Child Policy and articles in the Reader’s Digest. I spoke on campuses across America about these atrocities.

At the time, I was smugly convinced that such crimes—especially the unspeakable crime of infanticide—could never happen here in the United States. In dictatorial China, yes, but not in democratic America.

The Supreme Court made clear to me last week that my sense of moral superiority was misplaced. In Stenberg vs. Carhart, the court threw out Nebraska’s carefully worded ban on partial-birth abortion as unconstitutional, in effect legalizing the killing of nearly full-term babies in the most brutal and inhumane manner imaginable.

I felt as though I had suddenly been transported to another country—a country with no history of respect for human rights, a country whose written constitution was just a piece of paper to be shredded at will by a handful of powerful men. By legalizing infanticide, America had, to my way of thinking, abandoned any claims of moral superiority over China. So far had we debased our principles that we were, in a sense, even more degraded than China.

Let me explain.

As everyone knows, free elections are unknown in China. China’s leaders did not consult the Chinese people before embarking upon the one-child policy. They “legalized” the killing of full-term, healthy infants at birth by fiat. “Control China’s population by whatever means you must,” Deng Xiaoping ordered his officials in 1979, “Just do it. With the support of the Chinese Communist Party, you have nothing to fear.”

But our country is a democracy. We elected the men who appointed the judges who in 1973 declared abortion legal. We elected the men who appointed the judges who, just last week, said it was acceptable for “doctors” to deliver babies feet-first, with the sole purpose of piercing their brain and killing them.

Infanticide is an evil choice, especially when it is not illegal. For we as a democratic people are twice guilty; the first time in the law that made partial-birth abortion legal, and the second in the actual bloody killing itself. The most we can hold the Chinese people responsible for is the killing itself. For the Chinese people, unlike the American, do not make the laws of their country. 

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