Science and Ideology

I would like to thank Richard S. for his kind words and gentle rebuke. Furthermore, I am very grateful to him for his important posting on the Clinton-Richards op-ed perspective published in today’s The New York Times. In a brief response to Richard, I did not intend to suggest that the numerical magnitude of forty million abortions raises the concern that I hoped to address. Any single abortion that is considered without any further consideration to the welfare of the unborn and the precious life that is snuffed out is a most grievous concern, indeed. The democratic society that values not one life, let alone forty million, has much to answer for at the end of time if not before.

But I write today in response to Richard’s bringing to our attention to the Clinton-Richards opinion in which the authors state: “Last month, the Bush administration launched the latest salvo in its eight-year campaign to undermine women’s rights and women’s health by placing ideology ahead of science: a proposed rule from the Department of Health and Human Services that would govern family planning.”

I believe the Senator and Planned Parenthood President have a skewed view of science that leads them to conclude that “science” has been sacrificed in the name of someone else’s ideology. I believe that their claim is true but not in the fashion that Mss. Clinton and Richards assert—for they are the ones who place ideology before science. After all, objective science tells us that human life begins at conception. We are not talking about a clump of cells or a thing that can be relegated to the medical waste receptacle in an abortion clinic. We are addressing nascent human life, the same nascent human life you, I, the senator, the PPF President, have all shared at the beginning of entrance into the human family. Science, not ideology, informs us so with no doubt whatsoever.

Thus, the Clinton-Richards claim is true that ideology has eclipsed science—their ideology, not the President’s. It is tragic for one human, for thousands, for numbers now surpassing forty million young humans, that the Clinton-Richards ideology has replaced science in the minds of so many Americans who will go to the polls in November. But there is still time to stop their ideology and its future influence even though nothing can be done to reverse its tragic wake and restore the lives of so many who had so much to offer but were given no time to do so.

RJA sj