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Economic Boom, Ethical Bust

MORALS, NOT MARKETS, DETERMINE GOLDEN AGE

By Benjamin J. Stein

Here I am cleaning up my son's room watching a talk show and they are talking about our time--to the effect that we are now living in "The Golden Age" or at least "A Golden Age" in the history of America. This talk is based on the performance of the United States economy since about the end of 1991 until now, when we have had an uninterrupted economic expansion accompanied by rates of inflation that are low by the standards of the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era.

The Golden Age metaphor seems to apply especially to corporate earnings, which have risen very fast since 1987, more than doubling in that time period. This rise, combined with low interest rates, has powered a breathtaking rise in prices on the nation's stock markets, which I like a lot, and have talked about before. The S&P 500, for example, has roughly tripled just since 1991, and the S&P 500 has more than doubled just since the beginning of 1996.

More Americans than ever are millionaires, and while precise numbers are hard to come by, estimates from the Northern Trust Company are that more than $5 million in assets are no longer rare.

I keep thinking of numbers like this and the idea of the Golden Age.

Then I think about some other numbers. Since 1973, when the United States Supreme Court, with no precedent before it at all, decided that it was not constitutionally permissible for states to restrict abortions for most women, there have been an estimated 37 million or more abortions performed on United States women and their babies.

Every single one of these abortions violently ended the life of an American baby, as I see it. Last year, the Golden Age year of 1997, saw abortion "clinics" and hospitals end the lives of about 1.4 million American babies.

Now, I want to be the first to admit that not everyone sees abortion as the ending of a life. There are probably some people who still see a baby in the womb as unfeeling tissue, like a mole or subcutaneous fat. They see the baby in the sonogram looking like a baby and they don't believe it's a baby. They see the baby reacting to a needle and moving away from it and they don't think it's a life. They know that a baby in the womb relaxes when she or he hears soothing music and they don't think there's a baby there. There are people who know that babies look just like postpartum babies very soon after conception, when they are still in the womb, and have a strong sense of pain, but those people can still call an abortion something other than the violent killing of a baby. None so blind as those who will not see, goes the adage.

Of course, there are people who realize very well that a baby is a life in being, but honestly say that these lives are silent, have no votes, and are entitled to less legal and moral protection than the lives of grownups. If these pre-born lives are inconvenient, goes the reasoning of this group, then it is the right of the mother to kill her child. This is a brutal, but honest, approach.

And, of course, there are those who believe that the killing of about a million and a half babies per year is worthwhile if it saves a handful of women from being killed or maimed in illegal abortions. Never mind that every one of those babies is maimed and killed in an abortion, so that you really have a calculus in which the lives of about a hundred thousand babies are traded for the lives of one grown woman. But this quantum of people who see abortion as something other than gruesome, who believe it is justified for the convenience of adults and adolescents, and who will kill any number to save a tiny number, are in an interesting position: they cannot look at their handiwork or the handiwork they defend.

Across the country, they shrink from photos of the babies killed in abortions. Through their mighty political groups, the pro-abortionists compel TV stations to refuse advertisements showing partial birth and other abortion artifacts. They will not even allow viewers(or themselves, I suspect) to see what their policies have wrought. They are, at least to my mind, like the Germans who refused to think about what was happening at Dachau and then vomited when they saw-and never wanted to see again.

For the rest of us, who see abortion as the violent taking of innocent life, it is hard indeed to see our era as a Golden Age. How would we feel if a disease claimed a million and a half unborn lives every year? Would we think we were in a Golden Age? How would we feel if an enemy invader killed a million and a half of our unborn every year?

I know that there are intelligent people who disagree strongly with what I say here. I used to disagree strongly myself--before we had our adopted son, before we saw what might have been sucked out and ground up in a "clinic" or "women's health centers" (most absurd terms for killing rooms for little girls and boys), before we learned what everyone now knows about just how alive a baby in the womb is. But I think any intelligent man or woman who thinks about just the possibility that abortion is murder will have a hard time stopping before the terminus of the notion that it is murder. And for those who don't care to make the trip down that road, perhaps you can imagine the feelings of the tens of millions of us who see clearly that abortion is a violent killing of the most innocent of humans. Perhaps you can see why some of us don't see this as "A Golden Age"--and why we won't see it that way as long as the killing goes on, no matter how high the market goes. I love the high market, but it's dirt compared with life.

Reprinted with permission from The American Spectator, May 1998

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