We gather to mark the 25th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision by the United States Supreme Court, handed down by the justices on January 22, 1973.  This decision voided the laws banning or regulating abortion in all fifty states and made abortion a "free choice" between a woman and her doctor during the first six months of a pregnancy, a ruling supposedly backed by the full authority of the U.S. Constitution.  Looking back from our present time, we can see this decision as the first step in inaugurating a Culture of Death in this country, one where the abortion of over one million unborn babies annually would soon be joined by assisted suicide, euthanasia, 'partial birth' infanticide, and other cowardly modern answers to age-old human problems.

Now, my training is as an historian.  As I thought about the topic, "Twenty Five Years Into the Culture of Death," I instinctively turned to the records of that time, to January 1973, in order to answer the historian's basic questions:  Why did this event occur at that specific time?  And what forces or developments shaped this action? 

This foray into the recent past turned out to be a fascinating adventure, for the two weeks on either side of January 22, 1973 recorded a series of dramatic events, marking in some ways a sea-change in American politics and social life.  Indeed, some of these other events were of such contemporary importance that the Supreme Court's abortion decision was relegated to secondary, usually second-page, treatment.

The January 14 newspapers, for example, reported on the attack by 80 American B52 bombers on the North Vietnamese port city of Vinh, as the so-called "Christmas Bombing" of the North--inaugurated by President Richard Nixon three weeks earlier--continued.  The American combat involvement in Indochina, now ten years old, had reached new levels of violence.

The next day, January 15, President Nixon announced Phase III of his Wage-and-Price controls.  While Nixon declared his ongoing war-against-inflation to be a success, Phase III in fact represented Nixon's surrender to negative economic forces that public authorities could no longer contain.     The next day, January 16, President Nixon dramatically announced a unilateral suspension of further American attacks on North Vietnam.  His statement read:  "Because of the progress made in the negotiations [in Paris] between Dr. Kissinger and special advisor Le Duc Tho, [I have] directed that the bombing and further mining of North Vietnam be suspended."  Americans, rent by dissent over the war and a casualty list now counting 350,000 dead and wounded, waited anxiously for new developments. 

Then on Saturday, January 20, Richard Nixon was inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States.  The event featured the shortest parade in the annals of modern inaugurals but the largest single band ever assembled in the history of parades--1,976 marching members, symbolic of the fact that Nixon would now preside as President over the Bicentennial of the American Revolution in 1976.  Spiro Agnew, meanwhile, took the Vice Presidential oath of office eight minutes early, in order to assure a proper succession to the Presidency.  War protestors, estimated to number 200,000, gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, but their voices were muted by the growing euphoria over events in Paris.

The following Monday, January 22--the very day of the Roe v. Wade decision--former President Lyndon Johnson died of heart failure at his ranch in Texas.  Commentators noted the irony of the passing of the main architect of America's deep involvement in Vietnam at the very moment that that war had reached a climax.

The next day, Tuesday, January 23, Richard Nixon declared with dramatic flair that the war in Vietnam was over.  "Peace!" the headlines in three-inch letters declared.  A full truce was to begin the following Saturday; American Prisoners-of-War were to be released within 60 days; and remaining U.S. ground troops in Vietnam would be withdrawn over the same two month period. 

It was in the context of these stories that Americans received notice of the Roe v. Wade decision.  In relatively short articles found on the bottom of page 1, or on page 2, newspapers reported on the logic of Justice Harry Blackmun's opinion:  "It was based predominantly on what Blackman called a right of privacy.  He said the right 'is broad enough' to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."

But this 'second tier' treatment of the abortion decision reflects a deeper truth about study of the past.  Good historians know that is most often in the 'second' or 'third' tier of news reports that you find the most significant events for the future.  The big headlines usually chronicle events tied to what editors think is important about the near past.  Some of the small stories, though, actually prove to be omens, or signs of what is to come.

Indeed, across the United States, hundreds of thousands of Americans will gather over the next several days to remember in sorrow the Roe v. Wade decision.  But few if any gatherings will remember Nixon's 2nd inaugural, Johnson's death, the Christmas Bombing, or even the end of the Vietnam War.  Against every prediction of the time, the Abortion Decision of January 22, 1973, has grown into the most important event of those event-filled two weeks.

But more needs to be said:  If we peer deeper into the 'back pages' of the papers of late January 1973, we will find other stories that expose the strange spirit of that time.

As example, the January 22 papers note the return of fugitive Timothy Leary to the United States.  This apostle of hallucenigenic drugs--the professor who said LSD represented "a whole new life"--faced charges in California for marijuana use and prison escape.

The same day, news reports described the wedding of anti-war activists Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, in a free-form ceremony that included the singing of Vietnamese Communist songs.

Another report described a popular new course at Michigan State University:  Psychology 201, or Human Sexuality, featuring 'live' sex studies designed, in the professor's words, to take the "ssshh" out of the word, "sex." 

And finally, buried deep in the papers were early reports on the trial in Washington, DC, of James W. McCord, and G. Gordon Liddy, on charges of conspiring to break into the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate complex, Judge John J. Sirica presiding.

Here in Rockford, the local news had unique qualities of its own.  On the happy side, Rockfordians read eagerly during the week of January 21 about Rockford skater Janet Lynn's quest for a 5th U.S. Figure Skating Championship.  On a less happy but somehow familiar note, the Rockford school board, on Monday, January 22, 1973, failed to approve a promised report on school desegregation, while 250 parents attended an emotion-charged session on forced busing, held at Lincoln Middle School.

The same day, according to THE ROCKFORD MORNING STAR, our city's "medical, legal and religious leaders applauded the U.S. Supreme Court for its ruling...against laws prohibiting abortion."

Dr. Richard M. Ragsdale, chairman of the obstetrics and gynecology section of the Winnebago County Medical Society, declared:  "As an individual I am delighted at the decision and at the 7-2 vote....The Supreme Court didn't buy it half way."

The Rev. Frank S. Moyer of the Rockford Clergy Consultation Service also praised the court decision, since it "now permits each woman to consider her own unique situation."

Mrs. Fred H. Ware, a local member of Zero Population Growth, declared this "an exciting and unexpected ruling."

In Wednesday, January 24 editorials, Rockford's two papers joined the chorus of praise.  "Women have been granted a significant victory," proclaimed THE ROCKFORD MORNING STAR, while the afternoon paper, THE REGISTER-REPUBLIC, said the Supreme Court had "moved boldly" in an "act of liberation."    The only recorded dissent came from a far distance.  It was New York Catholic Archbishop Terrence Cardinal Cooke who asked:  "How many millions of children...will never live to see the light of day because of th[is] shocking action of the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court?"  As of 1998, we now know, the number would approach 40 million.

Elsewhere in the local papers over those days, we find other signs of moral and social change in our town:

-- Down at the public library, the "Lunch 'n Listen" program focused on Robert Francoeur's new book, UTOPIAN MOTHERHOOD, and its "unusual ideas on the future of sex" including surrogate parenthood, sex selection abortion, cloning, and genetic engineering.

-- Over at a local church, a new course for teenagers on sex featured explicit films of sexual relations, while the adult course focused on "open marriage," where "traditional closed-contract marriage should be replaced by a marriage bond with no possessiveness."

-- Meanwhile, Rockford Police narcotic specialists worried about the rapid spread of "Mr. Natural," small squares of paper, imprinted with a bearded robed man, and laced with LSD.  "We picked up one kid that had about fifteen hundred Mr. Naturals on sheets," a police officer reported.  Officials predicted an epidemic of drug use in the schools.

How, then, do we make sense out of all this?

The Roe v. Wade decision came at a time of great, perhaps unprecedented, moral confusion, political failure, and self doubt in our nation.  The America of 1963--an America of seeming strong families, Judeo-Christian values, and apparent religious renewal--this America had a decade later become almost a different place.

Local columnist Stan Buckles, writing for THE REGISTER-REPUBLIC, touched on this in a January 26, 1973, column explaining that the Pentagon was preparing a manual on the United States for POW's returning from North Vietnam, fearing that they would not recognize their old home, so great had been the moral and social changes here.  Admiral Jeremiah Denton, shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese in July 1965 and returned to American soil only on February 15, 1973, would put better into words this sense of disequilibrium, of leaving one kind of nation and returning to another:

"In the first weeks [after my return], unhappily, I began to note dark corners in America.  I saw the evidences of the new permissiveness, group sex, massage parlors, x-rated movies, the drug culture, that represented to me an alien element.  I also noted a mood of national political disunity which has damaged the foundations of the most powerful but compassionate nation on earth....It quickly became obvious that the basic problem was a deterioration in our national attitude towards the family and family life."

Indeed, so.  Strange ideologies or world views had taken root in an America torn by an unpopular war and racked by self doubt.  This was a time of open war on human nature, and on human fertility, one directed in particular against women.  Among the first advocates for the so-called "liberation" provided by easy abortion, let us remember, was PLAYBOY magazine.  The "Playboy philosopher" wanted his women sexually active, unmarried, and definitely childless, and easy abortion was necessary to this vision of male pleasure.  Population controllers, such as Paul Ehrlich, author of THE POPULATION BOMB, ruthlessly condemned the gift granted to women of bearing new life.  Through clever but deeply flawed arguments, he won a wide audience, particularly in colleges and universities, and led millions of young women and men to loneliness and a purposeless sterility.  Yes, a war on women, a hostility to families with children, and a drug culture based on moral nihilism poured across undefended cultural ramparts in the late 1960's, and almost destroyed our nation.

I say undefended cultural ramparts, for America's churches and synogagues were--in general--terribly silent during this time of upheaval.  Hints of this moral disarmament have already surfaced in my narrative, but let me be more specific.  By 1973, many of the mainline Protestant churches had become openly contemptuous of Christian sexual standards.  Some--such as the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, and, my own denomination, the Lutheran Church in America--had adopted formal statements favoring open access to abortion, well before the Supreme Court followed in their path.  Even conservative denominations were unsure of where they stood.  The Washington Bureau chief of the Baptist Press, for example, concluded that "religious liberty, human equality, and justice are advanced" by Roe v. Wade. Even the Roman Catholic Church found itself rocked by internal disputes in the early 1970's, limiting the effectiveness of its pro-life witness. 

Taken together, these causes and conditions made possible the Supreme Court's abortion decision.  Distracted by grand and terrible events, internally weakened by new ideological assaults, and relatively unprotected by religious leadership, America stumbled.

Here in Illinois, during the closing days of January, 1973, authorities moved quickly to bring the Court's abortion decision into effect.  On the 24th of the month, legislators in Springfield introduced a bill to rewrite Illinois' abortion law in line with Supreme Court guidelines.  Here in Rockford, the Winnebago County Medical Society sought ways to provide abortions on "an economically sound basis."  Dr. Ragsdale urged the founding of a walk-in clinic, noting that in order to keep the cost of an abortion in the $150-$200 range, "we must have a certain volume."

So we entered, nationally and locally, into a Culture of Death.  We remember and mourn those 40 million of our fellow Americans, and those twenty-five thousand of our ghostly local neighbors, who have vanished under its reign.

But are matters any different today?

I believe they are....

To begin with, the number of annual abortions in America is falling, both absolutely (where we see a decline of 12 percent since 1992) and relative to births (where the decline reaches near 25 percent).  There is no question that pro-life witness and public education about the real nature of abortion have been primary causes of this change.  Lives are being saved--a million or more since 1992 alone--through the daily work of pro-life organizations and persons, ranging from an effective new generation of advertisements on television to the one-on-one labors of volunteers in crisis pregnancy centers.

Second, abortion remains a central political issue, one that no candidate or legislator can ignore.  In a political age where public issues come and go, the pro-life movement has kept the heat on for over two decades, weathering all betrayals and disappointments. 

Third, we are beginning to win the contest for family renewal.  The abortion issue has always been embedded in broader attacks on and retreat from family living.  The social sciences are producing a wealth of data on the importance of marriage and child-rearing within marriage that are silencing the enthusiasts for "new family forms".  Discussion turns increasingly on ways to strengthen marriage and family, manifested concretely in groups like Promise Keepers and Focus on the Family, and in the thousands of young parents opening their marital unions to new life.

Finally, and most importanly, the churches are awakening.  I believe that the Holy Spirit is moving in our time toward some great end.  Statistics on rising church attendance and on belief in the power of prayer are crude but real signs of this.  If we but open our eyes and ears, there are portents or signs all about us that a new Great Awakening is at work in this land, and that the protection of new life and of the family are near its heart.

At our first World Congress of Families--held this past March--the witness for life and family extended across denominational divisions.  Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Assembly of God, Evangelical, Orthodox, Mormon, Jew, and Muslim--all the scattered children of Abraham--put aside their differences for four days and united in a statement declaring opposition to the Culture of Death, and in affirmation of family living and the protection of children, born and unborn. 

As always, our task now as Christians is to open our hearts to God, to submit to His will, and to proclaim the ultimate victory of Life over Death. This is--after all--the message of the Cross.  May it be so....