Dictionary.com defines “prescience” as “knowledge of things before they exist or happen; foreknowledge; foresight.”
An apt visual to accompany that definition would be a video from the March for Life, for, if ever there were an entity that embodied prescience, it is the pro-life movement.
On the night of January 22, 1973, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite led off his newscast with a report on Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that had been issued earlier that day. (You can see the YouTube clip by visiting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv1bmY4Wd34 .)
The report included a comment from Monsignor James McHugh, who was identified as a representative of the U.S. Catholic Conference. Msgr. McHugh stated, “In this instance the Supreme Court has withdrawn protection for the human rights of unborn children and it is teaching people that abortion is a rather innocuous procedure, provided that there are proper legal safeguards. I think that the judgment of the court will do a great deal to tear down the respect previously accorded human life in our culture.”
An estimated 59 million aborted children later, how right he was. Prescience.
In the same CBS broadcast, Cronkite said that Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia termed Roe “an unspeakable tragedy.”
In the past 44 years, millions of mothers have been left to grieve children lost to abortion–often silently, as the abortion industry fails to recognize the pain and suffering of its dissatisfied customers. Research has shown that in as many as 60 percent of cases, women are coerced into abortion–meaning that a boyfriend, husband, parent, grandparent, or someone else is pressuring them to patronize an abortion facility. Fathers often wordlessly grapple with their role in the decision to end the lives of their offspring.
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The major media are silent on the death toll from abortion–along with the physical and emotional toll it can take on women. A number of parishioners comment that they rarely hear the subject of abortion addressed from the pulpit.
“An unspeakable tragedy” indeed. Prescience.
A Pennsylvania Pro-Life Convention held five years after Roe featured a workshop entitled, “Abortion Doublespeak,” which delved into the fallacy behind pro-abortion slogans such as the “fetus (is) not (a) person,” and “right to choose.” Decades after Roe, promoters of abortion continue to deny the humanity of the preborn child, even when that child is giving a “thumbs up” in an Ultrasound. Pro-abortion politicians conveniently omit the fact that the woman inside her mother’s womb is given no choice about the significant matter of her very life. A 1978 workshop called “Women’s Viewpoint” pointed out how women are exploited by the abortion industry. This was years before a woman named Karnamaya Mongar walked into West Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s House of Horrors and ended up dead. And long before Gosnell was convicted of killing full-term babies by “snipping” their spinal cords.
“Abortion Doublespeak” on full display. “Women’s Viewpoint”–ignored, unless it follows the talking points of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion operation, which takes the lives of an astonishing number of baby boys and girls each year–320,000, by its own count.
The prescience of the pro-life movement cannot be denied. The predictions that Roe would undermine respect for life in our culture…give rise to an unspeakable tragedy…result in abortion double-speak…and cause the exploitation of women have all come to pass.
Thankfully, a significant number of the children who survived Roe, who are now adults often with children of their own, are dedicating their lives to exposing the tragic fall-out from that 1973 Supreme Court decision. They have both the benefit of the lessons of history and the blessing of foresight to know that our nation will be stronger…women will be empowered…and millions of children will be saved once Roe is reversed.
Truth and goodness and justice will win in the end. That is the prescient promise of the pro-life movement.
