By Charley Reese, King Features Syndicate
March 1997 – I don’t know why people are surprised that a society that legalizes and condones the killing of innocent children has become in all areas brutish, violent and corrupt.
A civilization cannot be segmented or compartmentalized. You can’t say to young people, it’s wrong to kill or use violence, except in the case of unborn children. How can you make a moral case against the entertainment industry, as vile and corrupt as it is, and at the same time support an industry that kills children in huge numbers?
In 2000 B.C., the Assyrian Code had this to say about abortion: “If a woman of her own accord drops that which is in her, they shall crucify her and not bury her.”
The Hippocratic Oath which some doctors ignore these days, says, “I will not give to a woman an instrument to procure abortion.’’ Even pagans, long before the advent of Christianity recognized the wrongness of killing the innocent.
How can people complain about incivility and then condone the killing of babies? How weird to prosecute a woman for damaging the child in her womb by taking crack cocaine when the same government condones the same woman killing the same child in an abortion clinic? How can you prosecute a man who kills a child in the womb with a gun, but not prosecute a man who kills a child in the womb with forceps and saline solutions?
The above two examples are blatant contradictions in the law. When you see contradictions in the law, then you know that you live in a society that is not governed by the rule of law but is instead a society governed by whim, political pull, fads and arbitrary decisions.
An American consensus? Of course there is no consensus today, and no consensus is possible between people who have no respect for life and people who believe life is sacred. Consensus is common agreement that presupposes common beliefs. There are no common beliefs between those who condone the killing of the unborn and those who oppose it
People should understand what abortion is: It is using death to solve a problem. This new life, a creature of God is inconvenient or too expensive or too troublesome. So terminate it. Laws and court decrees that legitimize abortion are laws and court decrees that legitimize the murder of the innocent.
What is the moral difference between a robber who kills a store clerk and an abortionist who kills a child? Neither the store clerk nor the child had done anything to merit death. Neither was a threat to anyone’s life. Both were creatures of God. Both, if we believe the Declaration of Independence, were endowed by God with unalienable rights among which is life.
There are a lot of lives that are inconvenient or expensive or troublesome to maintain: the severely retarded, the severely disabled, the elderly, the terminally ill. How long do you think it will take for a society that condones killing babies as a solution to social or economic problems to get around to killing others for the same reasons? The arguments for death are exactly the same. The economics and the efficiency are all on the side of death.
This decaying society elevates rationalization to the status of argument, but evil is not something solid that can be contained and segregated. It is more like gas, which once let loose permeates the whole area. You can’t get away with condoning murder over here and condemning it over there. Condone it anywhere and you create a brutal, violent society.
TO PUT THE MATTER bluntly, when consensus fails, when too many people share completely contradictory beliefs and values, there are only in the long run two possible outcomes: war in which one group imposes by force its beliefs on the other; or separation. We need to think seriously about what we are doing to ourselves in this country. 
