By Dave Andrusko
Here’s a question for you. Which president said, “The task that has fallen to us as Americans is to move the conscience of the world, to keep alive the hope and dream of freedom”? It surely isn’t President Biden whose reluctance to “second guess” totalitarian regimes has been vividly on display on multiple occasions.
No, the correct answer is President Ronald Reagan who delivered these remarks on February 18, 1983.
Over the years I have read many of President Reagan’s speeches and several books, including “Reagan, In His Own Hand,” a collection of just a portion of a massive number of writings he compiled over the decades. He was a much, much deeper thinker than the parodies his critics loved to produce.
Why do I mention this today? Two reasons.
#1. President Reagan was ahead of his time. In 1984 in a speech he delivered to the National Religious Broadcasters, President Reagan introduced the issue of fetal pain. He said, “There’s another grim truth we should face up to: Medical science doctors confirm that when the lives of the unborn are snuffed out, they often feel pain, pain that is long and agonizing.”
Thirty-eight years later, the Medical Establishment and its media amplifiers continue to pretend the very idea that an unborn baby can experience pain by 20 weeks is absurd. Sometimes they will grudgingly concede it’s possible by 29 weeks, other times, they pretend the child could not be capable of going through excruciating suffering and physical pain until she is born.
#2. To borrow from President Reagan, it is you, the readers of this post, to whom the task has fallen “to move the conscience of the world, to keep alive the hope and dream of freedom” for unborn children and the medically dependent.
An uphill struggle? Always.
But, not to coin a phrase, no one ever said it would be easy. Our opposition is loaded with money, and bolstered by the support of most of the major media, academia, and philanthropies.
The babies have you, “A Movement of Hope,” to quote NRL President Carol Tobias. It is an indefatigable hope, a hope built on a belief that we are all God’s children, and a hope undergirded by the knowledge one day unborn babies will once again be members in full standing in the human family.