No other success in life - not being President, or being wealthy, or going to college, or anything else - comes up to the success of the man and woman wbo can feel that they have done their duty and that their children and grandchildren rise up to call them blessed.(2)

If this were a regular sermon preached from a pulpit, of course I sbould make it long and dismal, like a winter's night, for fear people sbould call me eccentric. As it is only meant to be read at home, I will make it short, though it will not be sweet, for I have not a sweet subject.(3)

SAMUEL Taylor Coleridge often asserted that material is borrowed from writer to writer and from generation to generation, "in a series of immitated immitations--shadows of shadows of shadows of a farthing candle placed between two looking glasses." (4) Centuries before, Solomon said it another way:

"There is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9). In the case of both this book and its subject matter, that is certainly true.

Now to be sure, the technologies discussed here are of a relatively recent vintage. And my prose has only just now been cormposed. Nevertheless, each shares a heritages heritage of intractable conflict and controversy--tracing back to time immemorial. As a result, I have freely relied on the thinking, the wisdom, the conceptions, and the counsel of many others--particularly those who have gone on before me in the battle for life and liberty.

My friends in Europe--especially Paul de Forte, Emil Allande, and Michelle Gallion in France, and Sir Fred Catherwood, Jenny Rosser, and Louise Whitbread in England--helped tremendously in making my visits to their countries pleasant, fruitful, and informative.

In the United States, David Dunham at Legacy Communications, Carol Everett at Marketplace Christian Network, and Bill Breslin at Coral Ridge Ministries have all ungrudgingly offered help and encouragement to me at every turn. In addition, my remarkable staff--Mary Jane Morris, Mark Horne, Jennifer Burkett, Susan Allen, Nancy Britt, Charles Wolfe, Jim Small, and Carol Sue Quarquesso--all served faithfully in thankless tasks through many difficult days.

My publishers, Lane and Jan Dennis in the United States and Christopher Catherwood in the United Kingdom, believed in the importance of this project despite the conventional publishing industry wisdom that "issues books" simply are not economically viable.

I had the great pleasure of chatting with Steve and Annie Chapman in the airport in Wichita--after we had participated together in one of the most remarkable demonstrations of the breadth and depth of the pro-life movement, right there in the heartland. I was thrilled--I'd been a fan since the days of Dogwood. They promised to send my daughter some of their latest music. And they did. But I have to confess that it was Dad who wore the tapes out--during the writing of this book. I don't know whether to thank them or to rail against them for the innumerable times I had to abandon the keyboard to laugh or cry or pray or ponder. The rest of the soundtrack was ably provided by Paul Overstreet, Kathy Mattea, Gary Chapman, Bob Bennett, Michael Card, Charlie Peacock, Susan Ashton, and of course, the master interpreter of joyeuse garde, Kemper Crabb.

Once again my beloved family bore with my absences--both physical and mental--during the researching, writing, and editing stages. My wife, Karen, and my three children, Joel, Joanna, and Jesse, are a steadfast support for all that I am and all that I do.

In the marvelous provedence of God, I have indeed been surrounded by the goodness of others. For that I am both

Feast of Cyril Lucarius
Lewes, East Sussex, England

No abounding of material prosperity shall avail us if our spiritual senses atrophy. The foes of our own household will surely prevail against us unless there be in our people an inner life which finds its outer expression in a morality like unto that preached by the seers and prophets of God when the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome still lay in the future .(2)

I would have everybody able to read, and write, and cipher; indeed I don't think a man can know too much; but mark you, the knowing of these things is not education; and there are millions of your reading and writing people who are as ignorant as neighbor Norton's calf, that did not know its own mother. (3)

OUR culture's tortured struggle over abortion has recently taken a nasty turn with the introduction of several powerful new abortifacient drugs. Wildly heralded by feminist anct pro-abortion groups, roundly denounced by Christian and pro-life groups, the drugs have been drawn into the eye of a fierce storm of political intrigue, subversion, manipulation, and infighting.

Methotrexate, Epostane, Lilopristone, Onapristone, and Mifepristone all purport to be safe and effective post-coital "con-traceptive methods" or "morning after pills." Thus they have been lauded by sundry war-weary politicians and journalists in both Europe and America as a possible peaceful compromise on the issue of abortion. No such luck. Though quickly embraced by the World Health Organization, the Population Council, Planned Parenthood International, and the United Nations Council on Population Affairs, multiplied revelations of disturbing risks, side effects, and complications plus serious questions about practical complexity and tangible effectiveness, along with unrelenting opposition by pro-life organizations and medical ethics associations, have thrown the drugs into a boiling caldron of ideology, technology, sociology, and theology.

This short book is by no means an attempt to sort out all the questions surrounding the development, application, and consumption of these drugs. Instead, it is simply designed to provide a cogent introduction to the issue so that concerned parents, teachers, counselors, doctors, lawyers, public officials, voters, and activists can make wise and informed decisions about them.

In this increasingly polarized and controversial environment, well-intended souls on both sides of the issue find themselves carried along by don't-confuse-me-with-the-facts rhetoric, while others again from each end of the spectrum--feel that the facts are more important than their use. Hopefully this monograph will serve as a partial antidote to both of these lamentable tendencies.

The structure of the book is fairly straightforward.

In Part 1, the personal and practical dimensions of these new tcontraceptive" and "contragestational" technologies are established. Chapter One describes the experience of one woman who, wowed by the promise of the new drugs, actually submitted herself to the trying procedures.

In Part 11, the roots of the growing pharmacological conflict are examined. Chapter Two is a recapitulation of the history and background of the drugs, focusing particularly on the most familiar of them, Mifepristone and Mifegyne--or RU-486 as it is commonly called. Chapter Three recounts the long search for simple abortifacients and examines the impulses that give rise to such a search. Chapter Four documents the changing nature of the omnipresent medical industry and probes its impact on family issues. Chapter Five examines the role of media demagoguery in this swirling controversy.

In Part III, tentative conclusions are drawn, opportunities are highlighted, and alternatives are explored. Chapter Six takes the wider view of our current place in the annals of history in order to help provide a clearer context for the issue as well as attempting to outline a practical agenda for the future.

It is only fair to state at the outset that this entire discussion is framed by certain basic presuppositions: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that those rights begin with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of genuine happiness; and that to risk all for the sake of such freedoms is a moral imperative. In short, this book is forthrightly and unabashedly informed by the very same commitment to the orthodox verities of the Christian worldview that gave rise to the flowering of Western civilization in general and that gave impetus to the burgeoning of Western democratic repub-licanism in particular. It is only on that foundation, after all, that we can ever hope to bring resolution to the clash of perspectives that now threatens to wreck our great experiment in liberty on the shoals of division and derision.

If this book can in any way contribute to a confident return to that once indomitable consensus, it will have accomplished much.

Deo soli gloria. jesu juva .(4)

The world is at this moment passing through one of those terrible periods of convulsion when the souls of men and of nations are tried as by fire. Woe to the man or to the nation that at such a time stands as once Laodicea stood; as the people of ancient Meroz stood, when they dared not come to the help of the Lord against the mighty. In such a crisis the moral weakling is the enemy of the right, the enemy of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.(1)

Those who know the world best, trust it least: those who trust it at all are far from wise; as well trust a horse's heel or a dog's tooth. (2)

In securing any kind of peace, the first essential is to guarantee to every man the most elemnetary of rights: the right to his own life. Murder is not debatable. (4)
Theodore Roosevelt

Do not chose your way by its looks alone: after all, handsome shoes often pinch the feet. (5)
Charles H. Spurgeon

The fountains fall with hallowed delicacy into a framing space in the Place de la Concorde. Blue hues creep out from behind the Colonades in the Rue de Rivoli and through the grillwork of the Tuileries. The low elegant outlines of the Louvre are a serious metallic gray against the setting sun. Well tended branches hang brooding over animated cafes, embracing conversations with tender intimacy. Long windows open onto iron-clad balconies in marvelously archaic hotels, while gauzy lace curtains flutter across imagined hopes and wishes and dreams. Romance wafts freely in the sweet cool breezes off the Seine.

Ah, Paris in spring.

There is nothing quite like it.

Meredith Alexander, like so many before her, found its allure completely irresistible. When she had the opportunity to participate in a foreign university studies program during her junior year, she jumped at the chance. "Who wouldn't want to study in the most exotic city in the world," she asked? "I was ecstatic. My parents, though, were a bit apprehensive. Part of it was the money, the distance, and the cultural difference. But they were also concerned about me--about my emotional and spiritual maturity. I quickly allayed their fears. I told them there really was nothing to worry about. I could handle myself just fine. As it turns out, they were right, and I was wrong. Dead wrong."

Meredith went ahead and enrolled in the program, obtained a student's visa, made all the arrangements, and launched into the adventure of it all. She was even able to secure a small attic apartment just blocks away from the university campus in central Paris. "Really, everything seemed so perfect," she said. "Registration went off without a hitch--I got every one of the classes I was hoping for. And my apartment--well, I couldn't have possibly asked for anything better. It was in a wonderful eighteenth century building replete with high ceilings, ornamented plaster bas-relief across one wall, huge shuttered windows, antique furniture, and loads of dusty old books. And to top it all off, it was incredibly inexpensive."

On her student's budget she couldn't afford the typical tourist's initiation to the city--sitting in the chic cafes along the Champs Elysees for hours sipping champagne at twelve dollars a glass, or buying leather at Louis Vuitton at a thousand dollars per garment, or snatching up two hundred dollar scarves at Hermes, or eating at the epicurean five-star Bristol Hotel at more than three hundred dollars a meal--but she threw herself into the Parisian lifestyle nonetheless.

Each day, after her morning classes, she would wander over to the Pont Neuf bridge to explore the wares of the bouquinistes-- the traditional French booksellers who had pioneered their unique brand of transportable trade early in the seventeenth century. She would then visit one of the many magnificent museums or perhaps eat a picnic lunch in the Bois de Boulogne, the huge park along the city's western ridge. Often, she would end up gawking at the jubilant carnival atmosphere at the Champs de Mars just below the Eiffel Tower.

Nowhere does the novelist's prose slip more readily into the bland tones of the travel guidebook. Paris is a marvel of vintage sensory delights. And Meredith drank deeply from its draft. The staccato sounds of the clicking of saucers in the Place de la Contrescarpe, the trumpeting of traffic around the Arch de Triumph, and the conspiratorial whispering on benches in the Jardin de Luxembourg seem to play a jangling Debussy score in the twilight hours. The nostalgic smells of luxuriant perfumes, wine, and brandy; the invigorating odors of croissants, espresso, and cut lavender; and the acrid fumes of tobacco, roasted chestnuts, and salon sautes seem to texture a sweet and subtle Monet upon the canvas of l'entente de la vie. The dominating sights of the yellow towers of Notre Dame, the arched bridges cutting across the satin sheen of the river, and the stately elegance of the Bourbon palaces and pavilions scattered about the city like caches of mercy seem to sculpt a muscular Rodin bronze on the tabla rasa landscape.

"I was so free there," she said. "I felt unfettered and alive. Everything was so stimulating--it seemed that every day I could literally bathe in the greatest art, music, literature, and ideas mankind had ever conceived. It was almost heaven."

Almost. But not quite.

Victor Hugo, who loved the city with a passion, warned that the rich atmosphere of Parisian culture was deceptively intoxicating. He often asserted that, "No one can spend any length of time in Paris without being captivated by satyrs or muses or cupids or baccuses or all of them together."(6)

Meredith was captivated by all of them together.

Falling in with bohemian friends, she began to neglect her studies in order to devote herself to the delicacies of the flesh. "We'd go out on the town virtually every night," she told me, "hopping from one fashionably obscure cafe or bar to another. We'd be dancing, drinking, and philandering until the wee hours of the morning--and then I'd have to try to make it to my classes the next day. It wasn't long before I had become a real mess."

And then things took an odd turn for the worse: Meredith fell in love.

"At first, everything seemed to get better," she said. "I guess love really is blind. Marc came along right when I needed a change--some stability. He was so romantic--he perfectly fit my imagined stereotype of the gallant and chivalrous Frenchman. I fell head-over-heels in love almost immediately. The course the relationship ultimately took seems dully predictable from the vantage of hindsight, but at the time I was entirely taken by him."

Despite her best efforts at commitment, the relationship with Marc eventually turned sour. "I'll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that the moment I discovered I was pregnant, he became very, very scarce." Her voice had became a whisper: "Finally, one afternoon, he stopped by the apartment and handed me an envelope stuffed with about two hundred and fifty dollars and a couple of brochures from local abortion clinics. He said good-bye, turned on his heel, and that was it. I haven't seen him since"

Frightened and alone, Meredith had no earthly idea which way to turn. She was emotionally paralyzed.

One afternoon, a couple of days later, she saw a shabby poster pasted to a campus kiosk advertising a "maternal help center." It promised "compassionate Christian alternatives to abortion" for women caught in "the throes of a crisis pregnancy." She jotted down the number and dropped it into her purse--and then promptly forgot about it. She had become convinced there actually were no real "alternatives" for her.

She agonized over her plight. She stopped eating. She lost weight. She could hardly sleep. She avoided all her old friends and haunts.

Unable to stand the trauma any longer, she retrieved Marc's envelope and conjured up a deadly resolve: she would kill the unwanted child growing inside her womb. She would be done with the whole mess as quickly and as painlessly as possible and then get on with her life. "If I had only known then what I know now, things could have been so different," she later said. "I could have avoided so much grief."

One of the brochures in the envelope featured information about a new abortion procedure Meredith had heard a great deal about: RU-486 or Mifegyne. "It was supposed to be safe and easy," she remembered. "Just take a pill and poof, that's it. It's over. Kind of an at home, do-it-yourself, private abortion."

She called the clinic and set up an appointment.

The prodigious building housing the clinic was built as a bedlam(7) more than a century ago, and became a prison, then a lunatic asylum, and finally a hospital. It was converted into a government-run ambulatory care center during the Mitterand years of deprivatization and collectivization. It was a somber gothic institution--rising four stories to sharply pitched gables and slate roofs. It was an insolent impenetrable structure--like a continental dogma or a bureaucrat's humor.

According to state regulations, Meredith was required to submit to a comprehensive psychological analysis. "They said I was perfectly fine," she told me, "Which just goes to show you how little they know and how imprecise their science actually is."

After that, she had to talk with a "family planning" counselor. "That was really a joke," she admitted. "We didn't talk about family matters at all. We didn't talk about planning. And I certainly wouldn't call our conversation counseling. It was just an opportunity for the clinic to take care of a few technicalities--like signing a liability release form and an insurance waiver. I feel that if someone would have taken the time to talk to me, if only for a moment or two, I would have been able to make a more responsible decision. As it was, I was on an emotional runaway train, and the clinic staff merely added fuel to the fire." The counselor's words worked strange alchemy on her--like learning Latin from a parrot--and she relented.

The receptionist at the clinic scheduled Meredith to come back just over a week later--once the government-mandated waiting period had elapsed. At that time she would receive a prescribed abortifacient dose of Mifegyne.

It was a long walk home.

It was an even longer week afterwards. Meredith wrestled plaguing doubt. She was tortured with second thoughts, qualms, and misgivings. She weighed all her pros and cons. She even prayed for the first time in years, hoping against hope that somehow, someway, she could find a way to avoid the dastardly course she had set into motion.

The whole thing was turning out to be a lot more complicated than she had bargained on. RU-486 sounded frightfully dangerous, not safe. It appeared to be terribly difficult, not easy. It wasn't at all private. And as far as being an at-home, do-it-yourself procedure, well, that was the farthest thing from the reality she had discovered at the clinic.

Throughout the week she struggled fitfully with enigmas, mysteries, and anomalies of both heart and soul--her ambivalent vision skewed through one ravenous and one lenten eye.

The last evening before she was scheduled to go to the clinic, she left her apartment, crossed over to the Ile de la Cite and approached Notre Dame. She walked beside the great cathedral along the Rue de Cloitre. Its magnificence subsumed her in lofty thoughts of rapture and refreshment.

Architecture is a litmus test for the character of a culture. After all, the most valuable things in any human society are those very permanent and irrevocable things--things like families. And architecture comes nearer to being very permanent and irrevocable than any other man-made craft simply because it is so difficult to dispose of. A book may be torn to pieces, a painting may be hidden in a closet, a symphony may be ignored, but a spire flung toward heaven poses procedural difficulties to all but the most fiercely determined suppressors.

According to the great medieval builder and designer, Michel di Goivanni:

"Church architecture ought to be an earthly and temporal fulfillment of the Savior's own prophesy that though the voices of men be still, the rocks and stones themselves will cry out with the laud and praise and honor due unto the King of kings and the Lord of lords."(8)

One look at Notre Dame--or virtually any cathedral in Europe, for that matter--and it becomes readily apparent that in spite of all other possible shortcomings, medieval Parisians clearly comprehended that mandate. Taking their cue from the vast treasury of Biblical symbolism, those pioneers of Western culture left us a glorious heritage that continues to this day to translate sight into insight.

Everything in the multi-faceted design of the thirteenth century cathedral straddling the Seine--whether consciously or unconsciously--reflected some profound theological conception. Towers, spires, buttresses, bells, porches, gargoyles, aisles, transepts, naves, chancels, vaults, ambulatories, stained glass windows, sacristies, iconostasises, and narthexes were not simply pragmatic designations on a floor plan. They were integral aspects of the message those early congregants in Paris wished to convey.

But, what struck Meredith as she stood there that night was that they were also entirely unnecessary. They were unnecessary because beauty is never necessary. It is never functional or useful, because beauty somehow transcends the categories of the pragmatic. As theologian Alexander Schmemann has said:

"When, expecting someone we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love. As long as Christians love the Kingdom of God, and not only discuss it, they will represent it and signify it in art and beauty and theologically pregnant architecture."(9)

Scriptural teaching asserts that the Holy Spirit always establishes a visible glory environment around the Throne of God--sometimes with clouds or flames, sometimes with angels or stars, sometimes with pure light or rainbows, and sometimes with burnished metals or precious stones. Historically, the architectural precedent seen in this remarkable glory environment--whether portrayed in the Garden of Eden, in Noah's Ark, in the desert Tabernacle, in the Temple, or in the New Heavens and New Earth--was taken to be the norm for church architecture. Just as the glory environment proclaims the majesty of the Sovereign Lord, it only made sense to those earlier Christians that the environment of the church should proclaim it as well. They believed their churches should be Biblical, and that they should be simultaneously beautiful--going beyond the necessary. They believed, in other words, that the rocks and stones themselves should cry out: "Hosanna to the King."

Meredith saw all that and more. She wondered what it must have been like to have faith like that--culture transforming faith. And she wondered if such faith could ever again exist in this poor fallen world.

Before she left the cloisters, she spent a long while looking up at the sturdy and stalwart statue of Charlemagne guarding the narthex of the cathedral. His fierce countenance seemed terribly dark and foreboding. A sudden wave of fear snapped the spell of sanctity she had felt earlier, and with a shudder she crossed over to the other side of the street.

She turned left up the Quai aux Fleurs and started for home, exhausted. Just a half a block up though, at the site of Canon Fulbert's twelfth century house, she stopped again. There she read, for what must have been the hundredth time, a weathered bronze plaque dedicated to the memory of Paris' two most celebrated lovers: Abelard and Heloise.

Behind her now was Notre Dame. Before her was the canon's home. The juxtaposition was poignant: the house of God, that of the devil, and her wandering between the two. She had become like Abram, she thought, camped between Bethel and Ai--but without his faith.

Peter Abelard was a profoundly brilliant and immensely popular university lecturer during the halcyon days of the early twelfth century. His imposing intellect, stunning good looks, and winsome personality made him the focus of popular fashion--the medieval equivalent of a celebrity. But, he was a celebrity of real substance--unlike today's warholian paroxysms. His pioneering synthesis of Christian dogma and Greek philosophy--focusing particularly on the philosophical interaction between Aristotle, Plato, and the Patristics--greatly influenced his renowned pupils Peter Lombard, John of Salisbury, and Arnold of Brescia, and even anticipated the work of Thomas Aquinas two generations later. Though he was often opposed in his views by such formidable rivals as Bernard of Clairveaux, Abelard was clearly a giant in the land.

Heloise was the stunningly beautiful niece of the stern canon of Notre Dame. Though but a teen, she became the object of Abelard's attentions--and ultimately his passions. After convincing Fulbert to let him become the girl's tutor, he seduced her and she conceived a son.

The two lovers were subsequently married, but Fulbert's wrath could not be appeased. He continually harassed and threatened them both. In desperation, Abelard attempted to secretly remove his young wife and son to the safety of a convent in Argenteuil. Thinking Abelard planned to abandon her there, the outraged Fulbert had a band of ruffians attack and emasculate him.

The tragic story ends with Abelard in a monastery, Heloise in a convent, and their son, Astrolabe, raised as an oblate in a nearby hermitage--their family, their love, and their lives completely shattered.

Meredith clutched the relevance of history like a rag doll to her breast--and she felt more isolated and alone than ever. More often than not, reality is better represented by a dime-store novel than by a missa solemnis. For all their beauty and brilliance, Abelard and Heloise were bound by the same fussy philistine chains that bound her. For all their passion and pathos, they were forced to follow the same monotonous sequentiality of a sin-scarred life. She had always been prone to wander into other peoples' dreams, never to find her way back. So now she swallowed hard and accepted their fate as her own.

Doubling back, she crossed over to the Ile St. Louis. She leaned over the wooden rail of the bridge and looked up the river to the glittering lights of the city. Mingling with her tears, the water below was as smooth as Parisian silk and as black as Norman coal. As a couple walked past arm in arm, a bateau mouche went by, all bright with lights, going fast and quiet up and out of sight under the bridge. Still, it seemed that all the world had gone dark--medieval silhouettes clawed high against the sky and ancient trees shrouded the streets in ominous shadows.

She recalled Cyril Connolly's familiar lonely oeuvre:

"The city strains at her moorings, the river eddies round the stone prow where tall poplars stand like masts, and mist rises about the decaying houses which seventeenth century nobles raised on their meadows. Yielding asphalt, sliding waters; long windows with iron bars set in damp walls; anguish and fear. Rendez-vous des Mariniers, Hotel de Lauzun: moment of the night when the saint's blood liquefies, when the leaves shiver and presentiments of loss stir within the dark coil of our fatality."(10)

Finally, with tears still burning in her eyes, she returned home for a long night of fitful sleep. Her vigil had ended.

The next morning, she rose early. The hesitation and wonderment of the previous evening were gone--but not forgotten. A wave of morning sickness swept over her as she descended the steep staircase in her apartment building. Even so, she remained undeterred. She had well-worn calluses on her thoughts. Nothing could erode her resolve now--not the profundities of history or the profanities of modernity. Her course was set.

The city seemed even more austere and distant than the pale morning sky as she walked toward her appointment. She was torn between thinking that the world is wild and full of marvels and that it is dull and altogether routine--as if either could make a difference in this moment which was as exaggerated as eulogy.

In the half-light of dawn, the clinic appeared to be a grotesque samba tattoo on the landscape--a semi-nocturnal image that had haunted her now for nearly a fortnight. But after only a moment's nervous hesitation, she approached the doors. She did not enter at the front like a visitor; instead, she crept around to the back like a traitor.

And then she went in.

The clinic staff was ready for her. They ushered her into a small examining room and had her sign two more legal documents--a one-page release form and a government information inquiry. A few moments later a midwife carrying a small blue suitcase entered the small room and introduced herself. She then briefly explained how RU-486 actually worked. She spoke of "receptors" and "anti-hormones" and "steroid down-regulators" and "progesterone actions" in lucid happy tones. But Meredith was hardly paying attention. She just wanted it all over.

"Did you understand all that," the woman asked her?

"Yes."

"Are you sure you want to go ahead then."

"Yes."

"There is no turning back once you've taken the drug."

"I know. No turning back."

The midwife unlocked the suitcase and took out a sealed blue-and-white pharmaceutical box and handed it to Meredith.

Her hand trembled. Her eyes welled. She emptied the sole contents of the box--three small pills--into her hand. She clenched her teeth and set her jaw with determination.

"Ok. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it."

The woman handed her a glass of water.

She took the glass in her left hand and looked down at the pills in her right hand. They were about the size and the color of aspirin.

One by one she put them into her mouth and washed them down with the water. After the third swallow she took a long deep breath.

"It is done. And I did it myself."

"Yes dear. You did it. It's almost over."

"I did it. I killed my child."

"Now, now. Don't say such things. It's ok. You'll be fine. It's almost over."

But of course, it really wasn't ok. She really wasn't fine. And it really wasn't almost over. Not by a long shot.

She closed her eyes and shuddered with remorse.

It was just beginning. And she knew that only too well.

After she rested for a few moments, the midwife told Meredith she could go home. The drug would do its work, she was assured in soothing tones, but it would be about forty-eight hours before the bleeding would begin--bleeding that would indicate the abortion had been successful. At that time, she would have to return to the clinic to take a dose of prostaglandin--a labor inducer--so any remains of her unwanted pregnancy could be flushed out of her body.

"Two days," she later exclaimed. "Two days were an eternity. What was supposed to be a quick and easy private procedure had somehow evolved into a prolonged nightmare."

But even after those two days, the waiting was not done.

When she returned to the clinic at the prescribed time, the midwife expressed mild surprise that a menses flow had not yet begun. But she comforted and consoled Meredith--she said everything would be just fine nonetheless and then gave her the prostaglandin injection.

After a couple of hours, Meredith--exhausted and frightened now--began to feel a few irregular uterine contractions. But still there was no menses. The midwife told her there was nothing to be concerned about--the expulsion would certainly occur sometime in the next four or five days. And with that, she dispatched her home again.

That night, Meredith began to have severe contractions. She was wracked with nausea, dizziness, diarrhea, and vomiting. Eventually, the pain became so intense she could barely even get out of bed to use the bathroom. Hour after hour she writhed in agony.

"I honestly just wanted to die. And I thought I actually might at any moment. My breathing became labored and my heart was racing. The abdominal pain was unbearable. Even my vision had become blurred."

After three miserable days and nights of anguish, she screwed up enough resolve to make her way down the hall to the phone. She called for an ambulance. When the paramedics arrived, she was unconscious, sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood.

For the next seven days, the hospital worked to repair the damage to Meredith's fragile health.

"They said I was one of the rare exceptions," she told me. "Very lucky. After the initial examination in the emergency room the doctors recognized immediately that I was a victim of a failed pharmaceutical abortion. They were forced to perform a surgical D&C and suction procedure right away. They stopped some internal hemorrhaging and gave me a transfusion--apparently I had lost a tremendous amount of blood. They attached me to a respirator, briefly, because my lungs had begun to fill with fluid. And they attached me to a renal filter because my kidneys had become very strained--the toxicity levels in my bloodstream were well above the acceptable range. There were also a number of serious cardiac irregularities they worried about for a while--but those seemed to disappear after a couple of days. I was a total mess. But, I was also extremely lucky. I was alive. One nurse told me that was a minor miracle in and of itself. I thought about that a lot. I began to believe it was true."

It is said that there are only two ways of getting home. One is to never leave it. The other is to travel round the whole world till you return to it. Meredith--like so many prodigals before her--had tried the circuitous route. But now, at long last, she was on the return leg of the journey.

Shortly after she was dismissed from the hospital, she noticed a small slip of paper under the corner of a table in her apartment. She reached down and picked it up--a strange foreboding compelling her. It was a phone number scribbled in her own hand. Suddenly, she remembered: the Christian maternal help center. The note must have fallen out of her purse weeks ago.

For some unknown reason she called the number. And her story gushed out. For the first time she revealed all her shame, her remorse, her guilt, her pity, her pain, and her fears.

Over the next several days two counselors from the center took turns nursing Meredith's shattered emotions. They cooked meals for her. They tidied up the apartment. They ran a few errands and took care of some unresolved details at the university. But mostly they just listened to her.

And so she began to heal.

"My recovery was doubly difficult because, not only did my body have to mend, my soul had to mend as well," she said. "I had to come to terms with what I had done--to myself and to my child. If I had gotten a regular abortion, I might have been able to shift the blame, somehow, to Marc or to the doctor. But with RU-486, there was really no one to blame but myself. I was the one who made the decision. I was the one who took the pills. I did it. That is a terrible thing to have to face up to."

As soon as she was well enough to travel, Meredith bought a plane ticket home. She realized now that her parents had been right all along.

On her last evening in Paris, she revisited some of her old haunts and was struck by their obvious sadness. For the first time she saw emptiness in the eyes of vast numbers of the denizens of Gay Paree. The keen paradox of a simultaneous deep hollowness and shallow extravagance startled her. Here, she realized, nature is tame. It is civilization that is wild.

A beautiful civilization can make a person either love beauty or take it utterly for granted. A free civilization can either encourage responsibility or smother it. A great civilization can either spark the flames of faith or snuff them out. A civilization is a terrible and unpredictable thing.

She walked toward the Pont au Change where the Seine forms a sort of pool traversed by a swift current. It is a place feared by boatmen--a lonely treacherous place. She leaned over the parapet and gazed into the rushing waters recollecting the sum of her sorrows. It was during that odd sepulchral moment that immediately precedes midnight--when the stars are cloaked in the clouds and not a light can be seen from the Cite--and not a passerby--only the faint gleam of distant traffic and the shadowy outlines of Notre Dame in one direction and Fulbert's house in the other.

At long last, she took a deep cleansing breath and whispered a mournful French lament--a verse learned by rote during her school days--days that now seemed so very long ago:

"J'etais la quand la chose s'est passee, a cote du Pont Neuf,
Non loin du monument qu'on apple la Monnaie.
J'etais la quand elle s'est penchee et c'est moi qui l'ai poussee.
Il n'y avait rien d'autre a faire.
Je suis la Misere.
J'ai fait mon metier et la Seine a fait de meme,
Quand elle a referme sur elle so bras fraternal." (11)

And then she turned to leave--the wild civilization now behind her.

Ah, Paris in spring.

There is nothing quite like it.

Progress has brought us both unbounded opportunities and unbridled difficulties. Thus, the measure of our civilization will not be that we have done much, but what we have done with that much. I believe that the next half century will determine if we will advance the cause of Christian civilization or revert to the horrors of brutal paganism. The thought of modern industry in the hands of Christian charity is dream worth dreaming. The thought of industry in the hands of paganism is a nightmare beyond imagining. The choice between the two is upon us.(1)
Theodore Roosevelt

They say you may praise a fool till you make him useful: I don't know much about that, but I do know that if I get a bad knife I generally cut my finger, and a blunt axe is far more trouble than profit. A handsaw is a good thing, but not to shave with. (2)
Charles H. Spurgeon

Chapter Two: Death By Any Other Name res ipsa loquitur (3)

Never will I sit motionless while directly or indirectly apology is made for the murder of the helpless. (4) Theodore Roosevelt The fox admires the cheese; if it were not for that he would not care a rap for the raven. The bait is not put into the trap to feed the mouse, but to catch him. We don't light a fire for the herring's comfort, but to roast him. (5) Charles H. Spurgeon

In the Place de la Bastille, there stands a triumphant column crowned with a gamboling figure. It marks the site where a Jacobin mob started a revolution and ended an age. It is a monument to the fact that the greatest part of human history has been symbolic.

The fact is that when it was liberated, the Bastille was not a horrible prison. It was hardly a prison at all. There were only seven inmates--and all of them were quite mad. There was but a single jailer and virtually no fortifications. It was a decrepit ruin.

But while the Bastille had long ceased to be an instrument of oppression, it was still very much a symbol of oppression. And like all men, the Jacobins had an unshakable instinct for symbols.

The liberation and destruction of the Bastille was thus not a radical reform. It was a religious iconoclasm. It was the breaking of a symbol. And because symbols are often the most powerful integrating forces in a culture, it was the breaking of a culture.

As in the French Revolution in the eighteenth century, the struggle over the sanctity of human life today is fraught with conflicting symbols and raging iconoclasm. And at the center of that semiotic conflict stands the RU-486 abortion drug.

RU-486 is actually not a terribly significant gynecological development--it is but one among many of the new synthetic abortifacients. But, it has become a symbol of that development--and thus is very nearly sacrosanct.

Etienne-Emile Baulieu, the chief developer and crusading promoter of the drug, says with no little hyperbole, that it is, "the most important invention of the twentieth century," and that it therefore has been rightfully "elevated to mythic status."(6)

Apparently his assessment is something more than political posturing or personal braggadocio--for he is by no means alone:

According to Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization for Women, the drug is indeed, "symbolic of the battle for women's rights. It is the cornerstone of our future."(7)

Molly Yard, who was Ireland's immediate predecessor at NOW, agrees saying that RU-486 is "a most critical drug." Perhaps even, "the most significant medical advance in human history and the symbol of a brighter future for women everywhere."(8)

Paul Ehrlich, population researcher and author, asserts that it is the "medical breakthrough," that, "women everywhere have been hoping and praying for."(9)

Nita Lowey, a congresswoman from New York, claims it is "an important medical innovation that could dramatically enhance women's privacy and health."(10)

Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, says that RU-486 is a "truly remarkable" drug that has "amazing properties which hold tremendous promise for the benefit of women." Indeed, she bubbles, it is "an historic breakthrough in medicine."(11)

Syndicated columnist and pro-abortion mouthpiece Ellen Goodman opined that, "RU-486 offers the best possibility of muting the abortion conflict while at the same time protecting privacy." That is a marriage that she apparently believes was made in heaven.(12)

But the most laudatory praise of all comes from Lawrence Lader, longtime abortion advocate and founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League. He said:

"RU-486 presents a classic case of how scientific progress can revolutionize our lives. Within the last century, the railroad opened up Western America and became a major factor in turning the United States into an economic colossus. The elevator was essential to the development of the skyscraper, the vertical city, and the concentration of business and services in a unified geographic area. The automobile gave us more than speed; it opened up the suburbs and the possibility of combining a rural or semi-rural lifestyle with employment in the central city. The cathode-ray tube made television possible. Antibiotics and other pioneering drugs extended our life-span and improved the quality of these added years. But when it comes to making an impact on our personal relationships, the science of controlling human reproduction must be considered unique. No other development--not even the telephone, with its advantage of bringing families and friends together--has so drastically changed our lives."(13)

According to Lader, "With the development of RU-486, scientific progress has reached a whole new stage."(14)

It is difficult to argue with an invention that is touted as even more significant than the railroad, the elevator, the automobile, television, antibiotics, and the telephone--one that would put an end to bitterness and strife and offer mankind a dazzling new hope.

But there are those who would argue with it anyway--difficult task or not. It seems that not everyone is enamored by the drug. In fact many are down right hostile toward it.

Internationally, virtually every pro-life organization has vociferously condemned RU-486. With a single voice they have signalled their opposition to its continued development and distribution:

Joseph Scheidler, director of the Pro-Life Action League and one of the patriarchs of the modern pro-life movement, says that the drug is little more than "a human pesticide." It is very simply, "bad medicine," he says, and could eventually prove to be nothing less than a "prescription for disaster."(15)

Another of the movement's patriarchs, Paul Marx, has called RU-486, "chemical warfare on our families and a threat to the vitality of our civilization."(16)

Jack Willke, the long time spokesman for the international Right to Life community, has labeled the drug as nothing less than a "chemical killer."(17)

Bernard Nathanson, a renowned former abortionist who supplies technical support to medical practitioners and ethicists, said that it was simply, "the latest is a series of weapons in the burgeoning biological warfare against the unborn."(18)

William Brennan, a respected professor at St. Louis University, has gone even further:

"Today's world of exterminative medicine is dominated by a relentless search for the quickest, safest, and most effective method of doing away with the unwanted unborn. In this fiercely competitive milieu of scientific barbarism, the field of chemistry continues to play a leading role. RU-486 is merely the latest chemical agent directed against the innocent.(19)

And, at the second World Congress for Life in Tokyo, in 1991, a resolution was overwhelmingly passed by the international delegates calling for the "immediate withdrawal of RU-486 from the market."(20) In addition, the attendees called for a comprehensive boycott of all Roussel-Uclaf and Hoechst affiliates and subsidiaries worldwide--since they manufacture and distribute the drug--until it is out of production altogether.

According to Baulieu, such opposition ought to be dismissed out of hand as a "morally scandalous and inexplicable religious intolerance."(21)

Lader argues that critics are simply "extremists" and "fundamentalists" who stoop to "threats," "intimidation," and "violence."(22) Presumably, just to be so labeled is enough to exclude them from any serious participation in the public debate.

Kate Michelman, the executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, concurred saying, "The uproar over RU-486 exposes the darkest, ugliest secret of the anti-choice movement: an unrelenting fanaticism coupled with an almost total disregard for the health and lives of women."(23)

And abortion entrepreneur Larry Ottenger, opined that anyone who has the temerity to disparage the wonder drug must be a "schizophrenic crank bent on undoing the advances of modern medicine."(24)

There is no middle ground. Symbols never induce ambivalence--there are only iconoclasts(25) or iconodules.(26)

What is this drug that it can elicit such wildly varying responses and provoke such cantankerous name-calling? And how did it come to be the symbol of the abortion struggle?

A Quick Fix

"If the medieval alchemists knew what we know today," says Ottenger, "they would have tried to turn baser elements into RU-486 instead of gold. It is that valuable. It is a mother lode of modern magic."(27)

"No way," counters Herna Hroz, a local pro-life leader from Croatia. "If this drug is any kind of gold, it is fool's gold. If it is any kind of magic, it is black magic."(28)

Either way--whether it is actually of Midas or of Medussa--one thing is perfectly clear: RU-486, besides being a controversial political symbol is a remarkable pharmaceutical development.

The drug--like so many of the new abortifacients--is a computer designed synthetic steroid analog. An altered form of norethindrone--an artificial hormonal agent first used in the original birth control pill--it works to subvert the natural action of progesterone in the uterus.

Progesterone is a hormone that is naturally produced by a woman's body during the last two weeks of her regular menstrual cycle. It plays a central role in the establishment and maintenance of any possible pregnancy by creating an appropriately hospitable environment in the uterus. It is in fact, the sine qua non of pregnancy.

Its operating mechanism is a marvel of God's complex creative design:

Each month an egg develops in a follicle of the ovary. After ovulation is triggered by a surge of a luteinizing agent secreted by the pituitary gland, what is left of the ovarian follicle develops into something called the corpus luteum. This is what actually secretes the progesterone hormone.

At that point, the hormone begins to act on the endometrium of the uterus to prepare it for the implantation of a newly conceived embryo. If indeed conception has taken place, then the tiny child will enter the uterus from the fallopian tube and implant himself in the endometrium. The nascent placenta then begins discharging chorionic gonadotrophin, thus signaling the corpus luteum to continue production of prostaglandin. This will support the endometrium, relax any contractions in the uterine muscle, firm the cervix, and inhibit possible dilation. If conception has not occurred, then progesterone production gradually ceases and menstruation begins.

Etienne-Emile Baulieu--a maverick French researcher who began his medical career working on the first generation of birth control pills--convinced the pharmaceutical giant, Roussel-Uclaf to allow him to pursue anti-progesterone tests with a cholesterol derived steroid compound the company had recently isolated--dubbed RU-486 or mifepristone. He and his research staff believed that if they could somehow obstruct or neutralize progesterone with such an anti-hormone, any newly conceived child would not be able to attach itself to the womb. It would thus die and then be washed out of the uterus in an artificially provoked menses--a quick fix. That, at least, was their theory.

The blocking action would occur, they felt, when RU-486 molecules began bind to the receptors in the endometrium--thus leaving nothing for the progesterone to attach itself to. Without a sufficient supply of active progesterone, the lining of the uterus would literally disintegrate and be sloughed off. In addition, the anti-progesterone action of the drug would soften the cervix, induce uterine contractions, and stimulate dilation. All of these actions together, they believed, would make pregnancy termination perfunctory.

In the initial clinical tests however, pregnancies proved to be much more durable than expected. Despite the radical hormonal changes in a woman's body effected by the drug and the hostile aggravating agents it looses in her uterus, her womb is a naturally protective environment. All too often, the anti-progesterone drug merely damaged her uterus or her developing child. Or, it would effectively kill the child but was unable expel him. In test after test, women experienced prolonged bleeding and required either the administration of a labor-inducing drug or an abortifacient suction procedure to remove their dead child. The failure rate of the drug hovered between fifteen and fifty percent.(29)

Eventually, the researchers were forced to admit that the only way to reduce that unacceptable level of abortive failure was to combine the drug with a prostaglandin--which would supplement and accelerate the pregnancy expulsion as both a labor inducer and a uterine stripper. This enabled them to achieve a success rate somewhere between eighty-nine and ninety-five percent.(30)

More than a hundred thousand women have taken RU-486, in clinical tests and consumer applications, but there are still a number of mysteries surrounding the drug's action.(31) For instance, though it binds to uterine receptors with an affinity about three times as great as progesterone itself, the drug possesses a bulky dimethylaminophenyl group which appear to prevent the change in receptor conformation necessary for the activation of gene transcription.(32) In addition, there has been substantial evidence of blood insoluablity, adrenal incompatibility, and hormonal dysynchrony.(33) Thus, both the specter of short-term ineffectiveness and of long-term complications continue to haunt the drug's advocates--not quite the quick fix that Baulieu and Roussel had hoped for.(34)

Even so, the drug has been thrust into the forefront of the battle over abortion. Why and how are perhaps as mysterious as the anti-progesterone mechanism itself.

The Long and Winding Road

The development, testing, refinement, and distribution of RU-486 has followed a long and tortured course. But it is a course that helps throw a much needed spotlight on the arcane passions that have turned the drug into a political icon:

• In 1962, Dr. Gregory Pincus, the developer of the original birth control pill, postulated that if an anti-progesterone could ever be developed, it could very likely be used as an implantation inhibitor.
  
• Eight years later, his young associate, Etienne-Emile Baulieu, began government-funded progesterone receptor research at Bicetre Hospital in Paris.
  
• Shortly thereafter, a team of French researchers began to experiment with computer designed steroid hormones in an attempt to synthesize an anti-cortisone compound under the direction of Georges Teutsch, a chemist, and Daniel Philibert, a physician and pharmacologist.
  
• The researchers at Roussel-Uclaf, the firm that sponsored the studies, first synthesized RU-486 in early 1980, immediately noticing unique properties that indicated both glucocorticoid inhibitors and progesterone antagonists.
  
• Baulieu, now a consultant to Roussel, was invited to track a parallel line of studies two months later.
  
• Baulieu announced the first successful human testing of the drug as an abortifacient in April, 1982.
  
• Beginning early the next year, small-scale clinical trials were initiated under the auspices of the World Health Organization and the Population Council.
  
• The American government awarded three major grants for RU-486 clinical research through the National Institutes of Health sometime later in 1983.
  
• At about the same time substantial funding from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations as well as strategic support from the Hect Fund, the Lasker Fund, and Planned Parenthood allowed experiments to move ahead without delay.
  
• In October, 1984 scientists from seven countries working on RU-486 research met at the Rockefeller Foundation's conference and study center in Bellagio, Italy to exchange their findings.
  
• The proceedings of the Bellagio conference were published in the influential book The Anti-Progestin Steroid RU-486 and Human Fertility Control, edited by Baulieu and Rockefeller staffer Sheldon Segal.
• In 1985, research in Sweden indicated that the drug's abyssimal failure rate of 20-40 percent could be reduced significantly with a supplemental dose of prostaglandin to induce uterine contractions.
  
• Simultaneous testing began in America at the University of Southern California under the auspices of the Population Council.
  
• Late in 1986, two important articles appeared lauding the effectiveness of the drug--in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Contraceptive Technology Update.
  
• That same year, Roussel researchers admitted that regular dosages of the RU-486 actually interferes with the delicate balance in a woman's regular hormonal cycle and thus could not be used as a contraceptive--it could only be prescribed for abortifacient procedures.
  
• Planned Parenthood and several other pro-abortion organizations used their considerable media clout to launch a massive promotional campaign extolling the virtues of the drug throughout 1987.
  
• Because of poor clinical effectiveness, the French Health Ministry denied approval of the drug during the first month of 1988.
  
• Immediately, Roussel refiled an application for approval to use the abortifacient drug--this time in conjunction with a prostaglandin.
  
• The French government's Market Authorization Committee of the Ministry of Health approved the drug for consumer use on September 23, 1988.
  
• Three days later, the Food and Drug Administration issued an "Import Bulletin" prohibiting consumer entry and use of the drug in the United States.
  
• Reaction to the drug was immediate--pro-life organizations denounced its approval and launched various protests and boycotts against Roussel and its giant parent company, Hoechst.
  
• In response to the public outcry, Hoechst officials pressured Roussel to withdraw the abortifacient from the world market on October 26, 1988.
  
• Two days later, the French Minister of Health, Claude Evin, ordered the company to reinstate production and distribution "in the interest of the public health," saying that RU-486 was "the moral property of women, not just the property of the drug company."
  
• In December, the French government formally authorized procedures for the distribution of the drug--including a written warning about the many possible risks and complications to the women who take it.
  
• In the first month of 1989, Roussel began a nationwide give-away promotion for the drug--distributing it to some twenty thousand women.
  
• At the same time, a Gallup Poll published in Health Week magazine revealed that some sixty-two percent of all Americans opposed the production and distribution of "drugs for the sole purpose of causing abortions."
  
• On January 15, 1990, Dr. Andre Delmas and Dr. Pierre de Vernejoul, the president of France's National Academy of Medicine and the chairman of the Therapeutic Pharmacology Commission respectively, launched the International Inquiry Commission on RU-486 in the face of growing evidence of serious risks and complications.
  
• Unable to ignore the evidence any longer, the French government's Pharmaceutic National Committee issued a requirement on April 3, 1990, that warning labels accompany all future shipments of the drug specifically describing all possible dangers.
  
• Backtracking still further, the French government ruled in January 1991, that Health Minister Claude Evin never had the legal authority to force Roussel into resuming distribution of the drug--and that his two-year-old order had actually never gone into effect.
  
• The New Hampshire Senate passed a controversial resolution calling for their state to become a testing ground for the drug--despite the fact that at least twelve active testing permits had been granted by the FDA already.
  
• The first confirmed death connected with RU-486 was reported by the French Health Ministry on May 23, 1991.
  
• During that same week, Baulieu was in Canada to address the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League saying that the drug would soon be approved for second and third trimester abortions.
  
• Over the next several days, new reports of possible deaths, serious permanent disabilities, comas, and cardiac arrests began to surface regularly--but were down-played by the media.
  
• On April 10, 1991, ignoring the growing concerns in the medical community, long-time abortion crusader, Lawrence Lader, launched a massive RU-486 promotional campaign and international book tour.
  
• The drug was approved for consumer use in Britain and three Scandinavian countries during that summer--with several other European Community nations indicating that they would soon follow suit.
  
• In August, Planned Parenthood revealed that it had hammered out an aggressive strategy with Roussel's president, Edouard Sakiz, to form a pharmaceutical company that would secure distribution rights for the drug in countries where there was "political or religious resistance."
  
• At an embarrassingly small counter-protest and rally in Wichita, Kansas--where tens of thousands of pro-life citizens had previously demonstrated their resolve to rid their city of an insidious abortuary that specialized in child-killing procedures well into the eighth and ninth months--several prominent feminist activists promised to make the battle over RU-486 the "most bitterly fought crusade in our nation's history."
  

Clearly, the short but tumultuous history of RU-486 has been a long and winding road of setbacks, switchbacks, and comebacks. Such a record leaves a number of questions yet unanswered: Is it really safe? Is it really effective? Is it really easy? Is it really private? And is it really a breakthrough?

In short, is it a substantive advance in women's health care or just a shibboleth in the battle over abortion?

Is It Safe?

According to virtually all the pro-abortion pundits, RU-486 is entirely safe for the mother--with even less risks and complications than the widely used surgical procedures.(35) In fact, it is often praised as a great advancement in health care for women.(36)

"Extensive testing in Europe indicates that RU-486 is a safe, reliable, and relatively inexpensive alternative to surgical abortion," Kate Michelman says. "It may have the potential to save the lives of thousands of women."(37)

Ben Graber, an abortionist who also serves as a legislator in the state of Florida, asserted that the "promising" drug was "an excellent medication" and that he was certain it would prove to be "beneficial to lots of people."(38)

Ardent abortion supporter Allan Rosenfield, director of the School of Public Health at Columbia University, says that fears of risks and complications "are based on fiction."(39)

While Patricia Ireland boasts that the effects of RU-486 are "no worse than those of surgical abortion and possibly better."(40)

According to developer, Baulieu, the drug has proven itself to be "meticulously safe" with only a few occurrences of "minor side effects."(41)

But all that may be stretching things just a bit.

According to a special report in the American Druggist periodical, those minor side effects can actually be quite "nasty."(42)

Indeed they can.

In a recent clinical study in Britain, five hundred eighty-eight women were given abortions with RU-486 combined with the prostaglandin gemeprost. Five of the women bled so much that they required transfusions. One hundred sixty-six of them needed narcotics to ease the pain. Some one hundred fifty vomited and another seventy-three suffered diarrhea. Thirty-five failed to abort and had to undergo a follow-up surgical procedure. And together they averaged more than twenty days of heavy bleeding afterwards.(43)

And that report is by no means an isolated anomaly. Again and again, wherever RU-486 has been tested, serious complications have been reported.

On April 9, 1990, an International Inquiry Commission on RU-486 was established in Puteaux, France to investigate the wide range of these alleged medical hazards. Ten of the most highly regarded medical and pharmaceutical researchers in Europe--including the current presidents of the French National Academy of Medicine and the National Pharmacological Commission--examined every shred of clinical and consumer data on the drug. Their final report was more than a little disturbing. Besides the common side effects of nausea, irregular pulse, and , they found that "abnormal uterine metrorrhagia" (44)developed "in more than ninety percent of the cases." Moreover, an average drop of thirty percent in haematocrite (45)was observed. "That may partially explain," they argued, "the unduly high incidence of coronarite crises."(46) Finally, they noted "a strong stimulating effect by RU-486 on the growth of a breast cancerous cellular line," and "notably severe inhibitory properties on the immunitory system."(47)

Shortly after the report was released, Roussel-Uclaf admitting that nearly ten percent of all the women who had used the drug experienced "undesirable side effects." Two life threatening heart attacks had been reported: one myocardial infarction and one cardiac arrest. In addition, they revealed that another women had fallen into a coma for more than thirty-six hours following the administration of the procedure.

When the first RU-486 related deaths were reported in the spring of 1991, the French Ministry of Health--which had once heralded the drug as the "moral property" of women--instituted new regulations:

• The RU-486 and prostaglandin combination may not be given to women who smoke or have diabetes;
• It may not be given to women over thirty-five years of age;
  
• The abortionist must have immediate access to cardio-pulmonary resuscitation equipment;
  
• The average dosage of prostaglandin must be halved from 0.25 milligrams to 0.125 milligrams.(48)
  

When questioned about these precautions, Roussel-Uclaf's official spokeswoman, Catherine Euvrard explained simply that the drug was "too dangerous" to remain in use with "unregulated abandon."(49)

"After twenty years of a women's health movement that was supposed to make us more critically aware," says Patricia Hynes, who runs the Institute on Women and Technology at MIT, "I'm astounded--given fiascos such as DES--by the uncritical rush toward RU-486."(50)

Hynes recruited three medical experts to review all the extant literature on RU-486 abortions. Their one hundred page report raises a number of stupefying concerns ranging from next-birth deformities to cardio-pulmonary arrest. "RU-486 has a high failure rate on its own," says Lynette Dumble, director of transplantation research at the University of Melbourne in Australia and a co-author of the report. "Then they use a prostaglandin that has bad side effects. So you end up with two bad chemicals and no long term follow-up." She concludes, "Why would you want to run with those odds?"(51)

Why indeed?

Is It Effective?

Virtually every major medical journal on the European continent, in Britain, and in America have praised the abortifacient effectiveness of RU-486--from Lancet(52) to The New England Journal of Medicine(53), from The British Medical Journal(54) to Fertil Steril(55), and from The British Journal of Family Planning(56) to JAMA.(57)

That is certainly a formidable array of defenders. But even the most cursory examination of those reports reveals a whole host of unanswered difficulties--the chief of which is that the drug simply doesn't work very well. How it can be dubbed "effective" with a stand-alone failure rate of between fifteen and forty percent is itself a marvel of modern medicine.(58)

Even with the addition of the prostaglandin, the failure rate is abyssimally high. One out of every twenty RU-486 abortions fail--whereas only one in two hundred surgical suction procedures need to be repeated.(59)

That is why high profile abortion providers like Philip Stubblefield have had the audacity to question the wisdom of staking credibility of the pro-abortion movement on such shaky turf. He said RU-486 "probably represents a technical advance where none is needed, at least not very much," that, given the fact that the drug is not particularly safe and not particularly effective.(60)

But there may be an even darker side to the specter of the drugs ineffectiveness: besides doubling the risk of ordinary complications, French researchers have now admitted that when the administration of RU-486 and prostaglandin fail to cause a complete abortion, "the question arises whether the fetus is harmed if the pregnancy continues." Animal tests, they noted, have revealed that the drug causes "deformities in the skull of the fetus." And further, "prostaglandins have been reported to be teratogenic(61) in both animals and humans." Thus, developmental malformations are more than a little likely.(62)

In light of those revelations, Anna Desilets, executive director of Alliance for Life in Canada, asserted that, "Women should question whether RU-486 is the DES or Thalidomide of the nineties."(63) After all, even the drug's champions admit that, "the first generation of RU-486 users will be guinea pigs for the drug's long term side effects."(64)

Is It Easy?

Ease is a major selling point for RU-486. No muss. No fuss. Just take a pill and problem pregnancies simply vanish.

According to David Andrews, who recently served a stint as the acting president of Planned Parenthood, with RU-486, "abortion becomes as easy as visiting a doctor for a prescription."(65)

And the medical director of Planned Parenthood of New England, Judith Tyson says that the procedure is "so simple" many women will take the drug" never knowing whether they were pregnant" in the first place. "This is a perfect solution. Basically it just eliminates the whole question, and I think it's very nice that way."(66)

But, as it turns out, it is not quite that easy after all. Or nice.

Even the president of Roussel-Uclaf, Edouard Sakiz admits that, "as abortion procedures go RU-486 is not at all easy to use." He pointed out that, "it is much more complex to use" than vacuum aspiration, and requires more time because "the woman has to live with her abortion for at least a week with this technique." He confessed that, "it's an appalling psychological ordeal."(67)

RU-486 abortions call for at least four separate visits to the doctor over a period of three weeks. On the first visit, the patient receives a full physical examination--often including a vaginal sonogram to establish pregnancy. Since the procedure is only effective up to seven weeks following a missed menstrual period, precise timing is essential at this stage. After a week-long "reflection" period, the client visits is a clinic where she swallows three RU-486 pills. Then, on the third visit--this time either to a hospital or an abortion clinic equipped with complete non-ambulatory facilities--she receives an intramuscular injection of a prostaglandin. She is monitored there for about three to four hours and treated for the commonest side effects. Three out of four women abort their children there, while the remainder must go home and wait. Finally, about a week later, the fourth visit confirms the death of the child and the recovery of the mother.(68)

Not only is the process long and protracted, it is physically painful and psychologically debilitating.(69) Newsweek regretfully but honestly reported, "RU-486 is not the miraculous, painless, private morning-after drug that some have envisioned."(70) And that is the height of understatement.

Is It Private?

Still another major selling-point for the drug is that it purports to lend women far more privacy in their reproductive health maintenance--as an at-home do-it-yourself abortion technique.

Thus, according to Lawrence Lader:

"The crowning achievement of RU-486 is that it gives women the option of more privacy in their child-bearing decisions. Only the woman and her doctor need ever know that she has taken the pill, and followed it with an injection or a suppository a day or two later. Women do not need an institutional setting since they only experience bleeding similar if slightly heavier than their menstrual flow."(71)

"RU-486 could make surgical abortions obsolete," is the refrain heard again and again from the drug's advocates. According to Kate Michelman, "It could take reproductive decisions out of the political arena and put them back in the privacy of our homes."(72)

And Ellen Goodman asserted that the drug "would put most early abortions into a very private realm. A woman could get an abortion simply by swallowing."(73)

Once again though, RU-486 fails to live up to the claims of its partisans.

Because the medicinal abortion procedure is so complex and so dangerous, a woman must ford a veritable river of doctors, technicians, nurses, midwives, and administrators in order to submit herself to the three week long ordeal. Besides the four clinical visits, she must be psychologically screened and administratively approved. She has to sign waivers and releases. She must supply a family medical profile. And she must undergo post-procedural counseling.(74)

That is hardly the "non-invasive"and "non-intrusive" privacy panacea that the pro-abortion minions have promised.(75) In fact, it may very well "wrench women and families into a terrible display of the consequences of medical technology run amuck," says Joseph Scheidler, "where any notions of privacy will be dashed on the rocks of widespread public scrutiny."(76)

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration imposed a consumer import ban on the drug in the fear that someone might actually believe the privacy rhetoric and poison themselves. Frank Young, the FDA commissioner warned:

"The intended use of this drug makes it likely it would be used without the benefit of the supervision of a physician, and indiscriminate use could be hazardous to the patient's health because the drug has potential side effects such as uterine bleeding, severe nausea, vomiting, and weakness."(77)

In other words, both the drug and the arguments that surround it are prescriptions for disaster.

Is It a Breakthrough?

According to the common wisdom, RU-486 is not just an abortifacient. It is instead a versatile medical miracle with more uses than Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Oil Soap.

Ellen Goodman exults:

"So far, RU-486 has been shown to be useful in easing labor and treating Cushings disease. It has shown promise for the treatment of ovarian and breast cancer, endometriosis, and even brain tumors."(78)

Another journalist gushed that it might prove to be effective against "infertility" and "obesity" as well--maybe even better than snake oil potions and cure-all elixirs. (79)

According to William Regelson, a cancer specialist at the Medical College of Virginia, "If RU-486 were not an abortifacient, it would be considered a major medical breakthrough." He criticizes pro-life forces for "keeping the drug out of the hands" of researchers. He says simply, "the politics of abortion are blocking this drug" and as a result, "lives are at stake."(80)

It sounds almost too good to be true. And in fact it is.

Although limited testing has begun for a number of other applications for RU-486--with full FDA approval in the United States and under the auspices of the World Health Organization elsewhere--its only proven use is as an abortifacient.

That is the only reason that in America, the FDA has issued import restrictions on the drug. Jeff Nesbit, a spokesman for the agency said that it fails to meet the three most basic criteria for importation:

"A personally imported drug must be aimed at a serious or life threatening illness, there has to be no existing standard therapy for the illness, and there have to be no safety questions."(81)

RU-486 fails on all counts. As Richard Glassow, a chemical abortifacient expert, argues:

"Abortion pill supporters have exaggerated very small and preliminary research results into impressive sounding gains in areas of intense public interest, such as breast cancer and endometriosis. There is no scientific evidence showing that RU-486 has any proven use except to kill unborn babies."(82)

The initial report of the International Inquiry Commission on RU-486 concurred saying, "There is as of yet, absolutely no evidence that the compound has any therapeutic usefulness. Mere speculation is not enough to warrant the serious attention of the scientific community."(83)

Perhaps failing all else, advocates of the drug are simply indulging in a little wishful thinking. Or perhaps, more than just a little.

The Mythos

The evidence is indisputable. RU-486 doesn't work very well. It isn't very safe. It isn't very convenient. And it doesn't offer any significant advance over current child-killing procedures.

So why have pro-abortion forces rallied around it with such a passionate don't-confuse-me-with-the-facts commitment? Why would they deliberately tie this chemotherapeutic albatross to the neck of their movement? What sort of twisted sense does that make?

The answer is simply that the importance of RU-486 transcends the facts. It transcends intellectual integrity, technological practicality, and medical applicability. It has ascended into the rarified air of mythic sanctity.

According to Marie Bass, "RU-486 has become a metaphor for the entire abortion debate." Bass, who runs a public relations and lobbying firm that specializes in pro-abortion activity, admits that the symbolic significance of the drug seems at first sight to be seriously over-wrought. "I get uncomfortable sometimes that so much of the focus is on RU-486," she says. But because it has been enshrined in the unquestionable pantheon of the pro-abortion cultus, she confesses, "we really do not have any choice."(84)

Myths, according to theologian J. I. Packer, are "stories made up to sanctify social patterns."(85) They are little more than lies, carefully designed to reinforce a particular philosophy or morality within a culture. They are symbolic instruments of manipulation and control.

When Jeroboam splintered the nation of Israel after the death of Solomon, he knew that in order to consolidate his rule over the northern faction he would have to wean the people from their spiritual and emotional dependance on the temple in Jerusalem. So he manufactured a system of rituals, emblems, and myths. He instituted a symbolic feast at a symbolic shrine, attended by symbolic priests, before symbolic gods. Jeroboam's mythology sanctified a whole new set of social patterns. What would have been unthinkable before--idolatry, apostasy, and travesty--became almost overnight not only thinkable or acceptable, but conventional and habitual. As a result, the new king was able to manipulate and control his subjects.

The powerful, the would-be-powerful, and wish-they-were-powerful have always relied on such maneuvers. Plato and Thucidides observed the phenomenon during the golden era in Greece.(86) Plutarch and Augustine identified it during the long epoch of Roman glory.(87) Sergios Kasilov and Basil Argyros noted it during the Byzantine millennium.(88) Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas More recognized its importance during the European renaissance.(89) And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Colin Thubron have pointed it out in our own time.(90) None of those myth makers actually believed in their gods upon Olympus, across the River Styx, or within the Kremlin Palace. But as high priests of manipulation and control, they used those symbols to dominate the hearts and minds and lives of the masses.

Such men are always full of deceitful words (Psalm 36:3). Their counsel is deceitful (Proverbs 12:5). Their favor is deceitful (Proverbs 27:6). And their hearts are deceitful (Mark 7:22). They defraud the unsuspecting (Romans 16:18). displaying the spirit of anti-Christ (2 John 7), all for the sake of wealth, prestige, and prerogative (Proverbs 21:6).

Such puissance is, in the long run, all too fleeting however (Revelation 21:8), because myth makers do not go unpunished (Proverbs 19:5). Ultimately, their sin finds them out (Jeremiah 17:11). Even so, their lies continue to wreak havoc among the innocent (Micah 6:12).

The effectiveness and desirability of RU-486 is merely a myth designed to achieve certain social and political ends--and thus not only must we to be alert to its deception (Ephesians 4:14), testing those deceptions against the standard of truth (1 John 4:1-6), but we must expose its deceptions as well (Ephesians 5:11).

Woe to the bloody city, completely full of lies and pillage; Her prey never departs (Nahum 3:1).

There are those who believe that a new modernity demands a new morality. What they fail to consider is the harsh reality that there is no such thing as a new morality. There is only one morality. All else is immorality. There is only true Christian ethics over against which stands the whole of paganism. If we are to fulfill our great destiny as a people, then we must return to the old morality, the sole morality. (2)

Nonsense is nonsense whether it rhymes or not, just as bad half-pennies are good for nothing whether they jingle or lie quiet.(3)

In the prosaic blue-collar English neighborhood where Clara Darman grew up, resentment was as common as hedgerows. She was a part of that spoiled post-war generation that was rudely awakened to the fact that they might never be able to attain to the prosperity of their parents--at least not without paying the grueling price their parents had.

Their tightly packed row-houses and tiny hip-pocket gardens became emblematic for them of a society where no one is ever alone but is always lonely nonetheless. As prosperity passed them by, they gradually came to believe that the vehicle of their civilization was merely the luxurious giant whim of powerful malefactors, that the narrow suburban streets they had played on as children were paved with the gold of avarice, and the traffic there was fitfully directed by robber barons.

By the time she enrolled at the University of East Sussex, Clara was already well-versed in the rhetoric of rancor and envy--she had become a thoroughly modern and liberated woman. She wore all the right clothes--dark and dismal. She listened to all the right music--angry and discordant. She went to all the right meetings--strident and bombastic. And she believed all the right things--nihilistic and angst-ridden.

She was a picture of insolence.

She committed her weekends at home in Brighton to busking at the Royal Pavilion and Churchill Square with a grubby little stack of out-of-date issues of Marxism Today. She regularly worked herself into a piqued frenzy over such things as chlorofluorocarbons, plastic milk cartons, and styrofoam McDonalds packages. She waxed eloquent about apartheid in South Africa, deforestation in Brazil, whale harvesting in Japan, acid rain in Canada, and the international conspiracy of the Elders of Zion. She was heartbroken over what she was sure was the fraudulent electoral rejection of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. She was dumbfounded by the collapse of the worker's paradise in Eastern Europe. And she was flabbergasted by the de-sovietization of Gorbachev's perestroika.

Early on, Clara had become lemming-like in her hipper-than-thou, perennially-indignant, and compulsively-correct political associations. She joined Greenpeace, of course. And Amnesty International. But she also became a member of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, Housing Now, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the African National Congress, Sierra Club, and the New Internationalist Women's Cooperative. She even bathed with Body Shop soaps, ate Ben and Jerry's ice cream, and wore Birkenstock knock-offs and a cheap dangling nose-ring.

Like any good atheist, she knew what she knew. But like any good agnostic, she did not know what she did not know.

When she became pregnant during her sophomore year, Clara did exactly what was expected of her--she scheduled an appointment for an abortion at a local public health center. But several of her friends convinced her that a surgical abortion was passe. RU-486 was the bromide of fashion and they persuaded her to investigate it.

After a prolonged ordeal, Clara was able to undergo the procedure. It was supposed to put an end to her worries. But it was only just the beginning of them.

"From what I have now come to understand," she told me, "I really had an easy time of it--at least, compared with others who have taken the drug. I didn't have any life-threatening complications or anything like that. But I sure was miserable. I went in to the clinic all cocky and self-assured. But after almost a week of violent cramps, nausea, and diarrhea, I wasn't so confident. And the incessant bleeding worried me."

The doctors informed her she was going to be just fine--everything was perfectly normal. But she wasn't so sure.

"The bleeding wouldn't stop," she said. After two weeks I began to get really worried. Again though, the clinic told me just to relax--that kind of reaction to the treatment was not at all out of the ordinary, they said. Still, I couldn't help but believe anything that disruptive and distressing had to be bad for me."

But the physical side effects were the least of Clara's worries.

"My conscience was awakened like never before. I started thinking about what I had done. I was guilty and I felt it--and the physical trauma I was going through only heightened that kind of brooding. I couldn't escape the certain knowledge that I had been living a lie for far too long. And that now, I had inflicted the consequences of my own dishonesty on an innocent child--my own child."

When she tried to explain her feelings to her friends, they gaped at her resentfully--with looks that would fell birds.

"They were completely blind to what I was going through. Somehow, they thought my abortion should be a badge of honor--a kind of sacramental epiphany. They seemed to actually revel in it. They approached the whole subject with a religious carnival spirit. It was almost as if they had just vicariously participated in some long-anticipated arcane ritual. They mocked my squeamishness and derided my reticence. I felt grief-stricken and ashamed. But I also felt disoriented, lost, and alone. As they chattered gleefully, it began to dawn on me that I really didn't know them at all--and they really didn't know me. Our relationships had been built on shallow fads and fancies that had no relevance to the real world whatsoever. I couldn't decide who was the bigger fool, them or me."

It was suddenly obvious to her that to have a horror of the bourgeois is frightfully bourgeois, that non-conformity is always terrible in its avid conformity, and that despoiling life to the uttermost necessarily means begetting death to the outermost. She discovered that radicalism, like most other ancient religions is largely made up of false prophesies and unshackled perversities.

"I looked at my friends and shivers went up and down my spine. I understood for the first time the implications of our beliefs and actions. I realized that death was not just an unhappy consequence of our philosophy--it was actually barbarically essential to it. It always had been--and it always would be."

Ancient Arts

According to G. K. Chesterton, throughout human history, "there is above all, this supreme stamp of the barbarian; the sacrifice of the permanent to the temporary."(4)

Indeed, since the dawning of recorded history, man has always had a supressed fascination with death. Like a moth drawn to a candle flame, it seems that man compulsively deals in death--for that is his nature (Romans 5:12).

At the time of the primordial Garden Fall, man was suddenly bound into a covenant with death (Isaiah 28:15). Whether consciously or not, man became morbidly consumed with death (Jeremiah 8:3). Though carefully camoflauged by polite social convention, it became his basest motivation and incentive (Psalm 49:14). His mind became obsessed with it (Romans 8:6), his heart was fixed on it (Proverbs 21:6), and his flesh was ruled by it (Romans 8:2).

"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death" (Proverbs 14:12; 16:25).

The fact is, all men have fallen irrevocably into the grips of sin (Romans 3:23). And, "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23).

It is no wonder then that brutal forms of abortion and infanticide have always been normal--though admittedly, distasteful--aspects of human relations. Men have always contrived ingenious diversions to satisfy their fallen passions. And child-killing has invariably been noticably prominent among them.

Virtually every culture in Pagan antiquity pursued the ribald-saturnalia-death-dream of separating sex from responsibility--and was thus stained with the blood of innocent children:

• Unwanted infants in ancient Rome were abandoned outside the city walls to die from exposure to the elements or from the attacks of wild foraging beasts.
• Greeks often gave their pregnant women harsh doses of herbal or medicinal abortifacients.
• Persians developed highly sophisticated surgical curette procedures.
• Chinese women tied heavy ropes around their waists so excruciatingly tight that they either aborted or passed into unconsciousness.
• Ancient Hindus and Arabs concocted chemical pessaries--abortifacients that were pushed or pumped directly into the womb through the birth canal.
• Primitive Canaanites threw their children onto great flaming pyres as a sacrifice to their god Molech.
• Polynesians subjected their pregnant women to onerous tortures--their abdomens beaten with large stones or hot coals heaped upon their bodies.
• Japanese women straddled boiling cauldrons of parricidal brews.
• Egyptians disposed of their unwanted children by disemboweling and dismembering them shortly after birth--their collagen was then ritually harvested for the manufacture of cosmetic creams.

It is distressing to find that none of the great minds of the ancient world--from Plato and Aristotle to Seneca and Quintilian, from Pythagoras and Aristophanes to Livy and Cicero, from Herodotus and Thucidides to Plutarch and Euripides--discouraged or disparaged child-killing in any way. In fact, most of them actually quietly recommended it.

Man perennially tosses lives like dice--for both pleasure and profit.

Abortion and infanticide were so much a part of human societies they even figured prominently in their folklore and literature--providing a dominant literary leitmotif in their traditions, stories, myths, fables, and legends. For example:

• The founding of Rome was, according to popular mythology, the happy result of the failed infanticide of two newborns, Romulus and Remus.
• Oedipus was also presumed to be an abandoned child who was mercifully rescued by a lowly shepherd.
• Ion was a celebrated monarch in ancient Greece who, according to tradition, miraculously lived through a brutal abortion procedure.
• Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire, was supposedly a fortunate survivor of infanticide.
• According to Homer's legend, Paris was also once the victim of abandonment--long before his amorous indiscretions started the Trojan War.
• According to the various folk tales about their lives, Telephus, the king of Mysia in Greece, and Habius, ruler of the Cunetes in Spain, had both been exposed as children.
• Zeus, chief god of the Olympian pantheon, himself had been abandoned as a child. And he in turn exposed his twin sons, Zethus and Amphion.
• Similarly, other myths related the fact that Poseidon, Aesculapius, Hephaistos, Attis, and Cybele had all been abandoned to die.

A Clash of Cultures

Clearly, abortion was woven into the very fabric of Pagan cultures. It was almost second nature for the men and women of antiquity to kill their children. They saw nothing particularly cruel about it. In fact, it was instinctive for them to seek new and more efficient methods of despoiling the fruit of their wombs. They believed it was completely justifiable.

Even so, it remained, for the most part, a very discrete affair. And it was almost always cloaked in regret. Shame and guile have from the beginning been unlikely private partners in the brash public enterprise of smiting God's image (Romans 1: 18-32).

Throughout history, knowledge of abortifacient potions, elixirs, rituals, and procedures was entrusted to a small disreputable underground--mendicants, herbalists, alchemists, conjurers, sorcerers, soothsayers, or cabalists. Even in the most unabashedly and brutally perverse cultures, estimable citizens tried to keep a goodly distance between themselves and the distasteful business. Child-killing was merely tolerated as a necessary evil. But even that discomfiting compromise was challenged before long.

When successive waves of Christian missionaries first penetrated and finally converted those cultures, practicing abortionists were driven further and further from sight.(5) With one voice, those Christian pioneers cried out across the gulf of time the Good News of love and life. They unanimously proclaimed the Gospel--the victory of Christ Jesus over sin and death. And at great risk, they authenticated that cry in the way they lived their lives. They demonstrated that proclamation in their actions--rescuing the innocent, the helpless, and the perishing at every opportunity, by every means.

In fact, any list of the heroes of the Church reads like a pro-life honor roll--from Athanasius to Augustine, from Polycarp to Patrick, from John Chrysostom to Amy Carmichael, from Francis of Assisi to Francis Schaeffer, and from Brother Andrew to Mother Theresa, Christians have always affirmed a single-minded and unerring front against the abomination of abortion.

The worldview of those Christians made their pro-life witness an inescapable consequence of faith.

According to the Bible, death is "the enemy" (1Corinthians 15:26). Barrenness is "the curse" (Genesis 3:17-19). Both entered God's world of life and fruitfulness through sin (Romans 5:12). At the Fall, mankind was suddenly destined for death (Jeremiah 15:2). But the Lord God--the giver of life (Acts 17:25), the fountain of life (Psalm 36:9), the defender of life (Psalm 27:1), the prince of life (Acts 3:15), and the restorer of life (Ruth 4:15)--did not leave matters at that. He not only sent the message of life (Acts 5:20) and the words of life (John 6:68), He sent the light of life (John 8:12). He sent Christ, His only begotten Son--the life of the world (John 6:51)--to break the bonds of death (1Corinthians 15:54-56). Jesus "tasted death for everyone" (Hebrews 2:9), actually "abolishing death" for the sake of all men (2Timothy 1:10) and offering them new life (John 5:21).

As a result of the propagation of this worldview, the tolerable evil gradually became intolerable. Laws were passed. Penalties were exacted. And abortion almost became extinct altogether.

Almost, but not quite.

The seeds of death continued to germinate in the rotting soil of sin--waiting for another day.

The Mirror of Modernity

Faith Popcorn--no kidding, that is actually the name of one of brightest marketing consultants working with Fortune 500 companies on Madison Avenue today--has said that, "The future bears a great resemblance to the past, only more so."(7) The epoch of modernity--from the Victorian age to the present--has borne out the truth of that paradox.

Until the writings of Thomas Malthus made birth control a matter of social urgency during the nineteenth century, the quest for effective contraceptives and abortifacients was a selfish silent indulgence. It remained man's dirty little secret--driven underground by Christian consensus.

But with Malthus, that changed--almost overnight.

He was an errant clergyman and an eccentric professor of political economy whose mathematical theories convinced an entire generation of scientists, intellectuals, and social reformers that the world was facing an imminent economic crisis caused by unchecked human fertility. According to his calculations, population naturally increases by a geometric ratio, while the means of subsistence only increases by an arithmetic ratio. Thus poverty, deprivation, and hunger are inevitable, unless population can somehow be artificially restrained. Any responsible social policy must therefore impose population controls as the most pressing priority. In fact, Malthus argued, to attempt to deal with endemic needs in any other way could actually only aggravate the crisis all the more. As far as he was concerned, the very survival of the race depended on an immediate interferance in the mechanisms of both the state and the family. The Christian consensus that had reshaped Western culture had to be rolled back to the old Pagan ideals of yesteryear.

Malthus recommended that a kind of benevolent totalitarianism be imposed for the good of mankind. In his magnum opus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, he described his distopic agenda:

"All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room is made for them by the deaths of grown persons. Therefore we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns, we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlement in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders."(8)

Malthus believed that if man was to survive, men would have to be sacrificed. For the the sake of the greater good, lesser evils would have to be embraced. Ultimately, the materially poor, the spiritually diseased, the racially inferior, and the mentally incompetent would have to be eliminated. The only question was how?

A few of the disciples of Malthus believed the solution to that dilemma was political--to restrict immigration, centralize planning, reform social welfare, and tighten citizenship requirements. Some others thought the solution was technological--to control agricultural production, regulate medical proficiency, and nationalize industrial efficiency.

But the vast majority of Malthusians felt the solution was genetic--to inhibit "bad racial stocks," discourage charity and benevolence, and "aid the evolutionary ascent of man." Through selective breeding, eugenic repatterning(9), and craniometric specificity(10), they hoped to purify the bloodlines and improve the chromosonal stock of the "highest" and the "most fit"--or Aryan--race. Through segregation, sterilization, birth control, and abortion, they hoped to winnow the "lower" and "inferior" races out of the population--like chaff from wheat.

These distopic principles ultimately found their way into some of the most significant political and social programs of the last two centuries:

• Mary Wollstonecraft, a contemporary of Malthus, was the pioneer of the modern feminist movement. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women, she laid the ideological foundations that the next several generations of feminists--including Olive Schreiner, Anna Howard Shaw, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ellen Key, Ida Husted Harper, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Helen Gardener, Eliza Duffey, Frances Willard, and Emma Goldman--would ultimately build upon.(10) According to Goldman, that foundation necessitated clear-cut Malthusian ideals--the "elimination of the unfit" for the "ultimate good," and the "perfection of the race," as well as the "shunting of archaic Christian ethical restrictions" that might "hinder a return to the saner societal norm of Greece and Rome."(12)
• Charles Darwin took the thinking of Malthus one step further, postulating a survival of the fittest worldview, he had little sympathy for those species that seemed to be at the bottom of the evolutionary chain. His faithful disciples--who shaped the dogmas and the practical agendas of Social Darwinism--turned that lack of mercy into a veritable triage barrage. Michael Fletcher, an leading academic in the movement asserted that "the task of all responsible men" was to "gently assist the forward progress of the evolutionary ascent" in both "positive and negative regards." The only real obstacle to this, he argued, was the "mindless interference of Christian bleeding-hearts" who would "sustain the weak and inferior races" longer than "their natural due." (13)
• Adolf Hitler adopted the ideas of Malthus in a wholesale fashion in his administration of the Third Reich. His exterminative "final solution," his coercive abortion program in Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechlosavakia, and his elitist national socialism all echoed the Malthusian call to "rid the earth of dysgenic peoples by whatever means available" so that the elite might "enjoy the prosperity of the Fatherland."(14) He also reiterated the Malthusian ideal of eliminating any Christian mercy ministries or social service programs. "Let us spend our efforts and our resources," he implored, "on the productive, not on the wastrel."(15)
• Josef Stalin also wove the Malthusian ideal into his brutal interpretation of Marxism. His terrible Ukrainian triage, his collectivization of the Kulaks, and his Siberian genocide were all undertaken "for the good of the proletariat." He argued that, "The greatest obstacle to the successful completion of the people's revolution is the swarming of inferior races from the south and east."(16) And the only thing that kept him from eliminating that obstacle, he believed, was "the foolhardy interference of church charity."(17) That is why he ultimately made all Christian philanthropies illegal.
• Similarly, Margaret Sanger made Malthusian thinking the cornerstone of her endeavors. She was thoroughly convinced that the "inferior races" were actually "human weeds" and a "menace to civilization."(18) She believed "social regeneration" would only be possible as the "sinister forces of the hoards of irresponsibility and imbecility" were repulsed.(19) She accepted the Malthusian notion that organized Christian charity to ethnic minorities and the poor was a "symptom of a malignant social disease" because it encouraged the prolificacy of "defectives, delinquents, and dependents."(20) Those Malthusian notions were then woven into the very fabric of the organization she founded and led for nearly half a century--Planned Parenthood.(21)

Clearly, the practical import of Malthusianism--whether grafted into Wollstonecraft's Feminism, Darwin's Evolutionism, Hitler's Nazism, Stalin's Communism, or Sanger's Eugenicism--was that abortion and infanticide were advocated as social virtues and that traditional Christian values were derided as vices. It was that killing was offered as a beneficent solution to a plethora of planetary crises of monumental proportions. For almost the first time in history, a consistent pagan philosophy had been formulated not just to ethically defend genocide but to raise it to a new level of righteousness. Whereas most Pagan societies of the past endorsed it as a distasteful but necessary aspect of the natural order, with Malthusianism, death had been made altruistic--and a new movement was ensconced on the world's stage.

Love Potion Number Nine

Political theorist, Ayn Rand, may well have had this chilling legacy of Malthus in mind when she said that:

"Every major horror of history has been committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by the disciples of altruism? Hardly."(22)

With the demise of ideological totalitarianism toward the end of the twentieth century, most Malthusians turned to the practical totalitarianism of social control through birth control as the last best hope of their altruism. Undoubtedly, it has become--as Margaret Sanger predicted that it would--their "Love Potion" and their "Holy Grail."

Interestingly, for them, birth control has never meant contraception per se. Instead, it has meant anything that could guarantee the absolute separation of sex and procreation--and that, ultimately, has required at least a fall-back dependence on various forms of abortion. The reason is simple: no contraceptive technique is absolutely fool-proof.

In the United States alone, ninety percent of the fifty-five million women of reproductive age who are "at risk" of unwanted pregnancies use some form of contraception,(24) including as many as seventy-nine percent of all sexually active teens.(25) Even so, there are more than three million unwanted pregnancies reported annually.(26) There are more than fourteen million cases of venereal disease reported every year.(27)

The annual in-use failure rate for the pill is as high as eleven percent.(28) For the diaphragm, the normal failure rate is nearly thirty-two percent.(29) For the inter-uterine coil--or the IUD, as it is most often called--it is almost eleven percent.(30) For "safe sex" condoms, it is over eighteen percent.(31) And for the various foam, cream, and jelly spermicides, it can range as high as thirty-four percent.(32) That means that a sexually active fourteen-year-old girl who faithfully uses the pill has a forty-four percent chance of getting pregnant at least once before she finishes high school.(33) She has a sixty-nine percent chance of getting pregnant at least once before she finishes college.(34) And she has a thirty percent chance of getting pregnant two or more times.(35) If she relies on "safe sex" condoms, the likelihood of an unwanted pregnancy while she is in school rises to nearly eighty-seven percent.(36)

In other words, reliance on contraception virtually guarantees that women will get pregnant--and that they will then be forced to fall back on the birth control lynch pin: abortion.

Birth control advocates know that only too well.

That is why virtually all the new drugs marshalled into the birth control arsenal have abortifacient actions--from Norplant and the Melatonin pill to Levonorgestrel coils and Capronor implants, from the low-level Estrogen pill and RU-486 to vaginal rings and transdermal patches.

And that is why abortion is such a big business. Abortion is the inescapable bottom line for the Malthusian altruists.

Since its decriminalization some two decades ago, abortion has grown into a five hundred million dollar a year industry in the America,(37) another half a billion dollars in Europe,(38) and an estimated ten billion dollars a year worldwide.(39) More than 120,000 women each day, almost fifty million per year, resort to abortion and then to its various birth control subsidiaries.(40) It has thus become the most frequently performed surgical operation.(41) Undoubtedly, the mind-numbing vastness of this market has created unprecedented opportunities for a wildly profitable stock-in-trade.

The rush to get RU-486 to market is the direct result of those pressing opportunities--drawing two of the most significant instruments of Malthusian altruism into the medico-political limelight: Planned Parenthood and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood is the world's oldest, largest, and best organized provider of abortion and birth control services. (42)From its modest beginnings around the turn of the century, when the entire makeshift operation consisted of nothing more than a two-room makeshift clinic in a seedy Brooklyn neighborhood(43) staffed by three untrained volunteers,(44) it has expanded dramatically into a multi-billion dollar international conglomerate with programs and activities in one hundred twenty nations on every continent.(45) In the United States--where the organization enjoys its strongest institutional support--it employs more than twenty thousand staff personnel and volunteers(46) in over eight hundred clinics,(47) nearly two hundred affiliates,(48) and more than fifty chapters(49) in every major metropolitan area coast to coast.(50)

In 1922, Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood's now-sainted founder, chided social workers, philanthropists, and churchmen for perpetuating "the cruelty of charity."(51) She argued that organized attempts to help the poor were the "surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents."(52) She went on to say that the most "insidiously injurious philanthropy" was the maternity care given to poor women.(53) She concluded her diatribe by describing all those who refused to see the necessity of severely regulating the fertility of the working class as "benign imbeciles, who encourage the defective and diseased elements of humanity in their reckless and irresponsible swarming and spawning."(54)

Her alternative to charity was "to eliminate the stocks" she felt were most detrimental "to the future of the race and the world."(55) To that end, Planned Parenthood has always targeted minorities, the unwanted, and the disadvantaged for family limitation, abortion, and sterilization.(56) "More children from the fit, less from the unfit," Sanger opined, "that is the chief issue of birth control."(57) Showing her altruistic stripes, she said, "The most merciful thing that a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it."(58)

Thus, while the organization has often trumpeted its concerns about contraception, education, and maternal health, its chief concern has always been to charitably eliminate the unwanted. Animosity toward the weak and lowly has been its hallmark from its earliest days.(59) In fact, its entire program of family limitation was designed to foster an elitist decimation of the underclasses.(60)

To this day Planned Parenthood's literature focuses on the "terrible burden" the poor place on the rich.(61) It is constantly reminding us of the costs welfare mothers incur for the elite.(62) It is forever devising new pans to penetrate black, hispanic, ethnic, and Third World communities with its crippling message of eugenic racism.(63) Its only use for the deprived and rejected is as bait for huge federal subsidies and foundation grants and as fodder for its lucrative abortion business. "If we must have welfare," Sanger argued, "give it to the rich, not to the poor."(64) For years, her organization has attempted to translate that philosophy into public policy.

Among the recently proposed measures Planned Parenthood has spotlighted in its literature are such things as the elimination of child care, medical attention, scholarships, housing, loans, and subsidies to poor families.(65) In addition, it has given voice to the suggestion that maternity benefits be drastically reduced or even eliminated, that substantial, across-the-board marriage and child taxes be imposed, and that large families not be given preferential charitable relief.(66)

Utilizing its considerable wealth, manpower, and influence, Planned Parenthood has muscled its way into virtually every facet of modern life. It now plays a strategic role in the health and social services community.(67) It is actively involved in both advertising and programming in the mass media.(68) It exerts a major influence on public and private education.(69) It carries considerable political clout through lobbying, legislation, advocacy, campaigning, and litigation.(70) It is involved in publishing,(71) research,(72) medical technology,(73) judicial activism,(74) public relations(75), foreign affairs,(76) psychological counseling,(77) sociological planning,(78) demographic investigation,(79) curriculum development,(80) pharmacological distribution,(81) theological reorientation,(82) and public legal service provision.(83)

When Planned Parenthood announced it was going to reinforce "its strategic investment in the development and distribution of RU-486" with "even more resources than ever before," it was signalling world opinion makers that it really meant business--in more ways than one. Pledging to lay "whatever political, commercial, educational, medical, and pharmaceutical foundations may be necessary," the organization was throwing its full weight into the battle over the drug.(84)

And that is a lot of weight.

The Rockefeller Foundation

When he first went into business, immediately after graduating from high school in 1855, John D. Rockefeller began his lifelong practice of tithing. As a deacon and Sunday School teacher at the Erie Street Baptist Church, he was absolutely ardent about the necessity for Christians to exercise wise stewardship over all that God had entrusted to them. In 1858, he entered into commodities commission partnership in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. By 1863, the business had become prosperous enough to expand into the newly emerging oil industry. And by 1865, Rockefeller was able to buy his partners out, launching what would prove to be the most remarkable success story in American business history.

Through it all, he continued to give ten percent of his vastly expanding wealth to his church and its various missionary endeavors. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, that amounted to well over a million dollars a year--an unfathomably huge sum in that day. But his commitment was unshakable. He said:

"God gave me my money. I believe that the power to make money is a gift to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.(85)

And his conscience dictated that he pour his charitable dollars primarily into church work--planting new Baptist missions, establishing new pastoral training centers, endowing universities, and supporting hospitals. He gave millions to the University of Chicago, for instance--which was a Baptist school begun by Stephen Douglas in 1856 as the Morgan Park Theological Seminary. Rockefeller also launched the Pioneer Baptist Church Establishment Agency and the Baptist Central Missionary Society as conduits for his ever-enlarging giving program.

By 1891, however, he discovered that finding worthy beneficiaries for his gifts was consuming nearly as much of his time as his business. Part of the problem was simply the immensity of the task. But worse than that were the dunning pleas from a myriad of grant-seekers. "Neither in the privacy of his home, nor at the table, nor in the aisles of his church, nor during business hours, nor anywhere else was he secure from insistent appeal," said Frederick T. Gates, a Baptist preacher Rockefeller often turned to for wise counsel. "He was constantly hunted, stalked, and hounded almost like a wild animal."(86)

Exhausted and frustrated, Rockefeller asked Gates to become his "chief almoner."(87) The minister immediately demonstrated unswerving discernment and a keen sense of business propriety. He began to evaluate every request for funds, draw up recommendations and guidelines for giving, and then follow up each gift to make certain they were spent responsibly.

Although the sums he dispensed were quite sizable for the day, it was still quite a humble beginning for what would one day be a veritable philanthropic industry--one that would make the Rockefeller family an international institution. In 1913, after devising an entirely new legal trust structure--as revolutionary in its conception as the inter-state industrial corporation had been two decades earlier--Gates and Rockefeller established the Rockefeller Foundation. It quickly became the most powerful and influencial charitable organization in history.

Although it continued to place a heavy emphasis on Baptist missions, the foundation began a new series of ambitious projects that would literally help to reshape civilization:

• The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was launched--with an endowment of more than a million dollars to build and equip the finest laboratory in the world. Within a decade scientists there had developed treatments--or in some instances cures--for meningitis, yellow fever, infantile paralysis, and pneumonia.(88)
  
• The General Education Board was incorporated with more than ten million dollars. Beginning in the American South and West, it dramatic