What Would Reagan Do?

In 1984 President Reagan published a small volume Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation that included postscripts by the agency of his surgeon general, C. Everett Koop and the British writer Malcolm Muggeridge. It was the first volume published by a sitting president. Reagan's contribution to the turn had been published in the spring of 1983 in the Human Life Review, on the other hand he saw fit to republish it with equal reason that his argument could reach a wider audience.

On June 5 2004 President Reagan died of pneumonia after a ten-year battle with Alzheimer's disease. His death brought an avalanche of media coverage, including commentary by the agency of the late president's friends and enemys and apparently neutral observers in the pres Despite all of that, his position upon abortion was rarely mentioned in the mainstream media. I did, however, hear several mentions of Nancy Reagan's support of embryonic stem-cell research-an endorsement based upon that research's purported promise of finding a specific for Alzheimer's.

In fact, Ron Reagan, the son of Mr Reagan and her late husband, will be offering a prime-time address at the Democratic Convention tonight in which he will guard such research.

We can certainly understand on what account Mrs. Reagan takes the position she does. For a decade she undergoed as she saw her beloved husband's mental faculties deteriorate, until he could no longer recognize her, his children, or their closest and dearest friends. If the president had died of a heart attack or flat cancer, it would have been painful for his family, on the other hand it wouldn't have approached the anguish of witnessing the protracted escaping of talent, memory, and wit from a man who had those things in abundance. No individual can blame Mrs. Reagan for employing her public reputation and reservoir of serviceable will to promote the scientific research she believes will spare other families from the misfortune that she and hers have suffered

But as I listened to the commentators extolling Mr Reagan's cause, I asked myself the question: What would Ronald Reagan do? in the way that I pulled out my transcript of Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, to apply the implications of President Reagan's argument to the sort of research his widow now advocates.

Ronald Reagan's work upon abortion is animated by his understanding of human equality. He rest it in the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, and in reality in President Lincoln's cast of "a new birth of freedom." For President Reagan, what mattered in the abortion debate-what is doing the moral work, for a like reason to speak-is whether the unborn is a member of the greater human family, not whether it exhibits the characteristics we find in that family's healthy adult members. "[W]e live in a time," he wrote "when more [i]or[/i] less do not value all human life. They want to pick and make choice of what individuals have value. a certain number of have said that only those individuals with 'consciousness of self are human beings.... Obviously, a certain quantity of influential people want to contradict that every human life has intrinsic, sacred worth. They insist that a member of the human race must have certain qualities before they accord him or her status as a 'human being.'"

Reagan saw in this debate what Lincoln saw in the issue of slavery: Are the slaves really human beings in possession of the same nature as their owners? If in like manner then they are not meant to be peculiarity but are bearers of rights, entitled to the same protections beneath the law as all beings who posses that nature. For Reagan, in make go round the question was: Does the unborn fetus posses the same nature she will posses as she become greater [i]or[/i] largers and develops into an infant, a child, an adolescent, a young adult, a middle-ager, a senior citizen?

President Reagan saw the of great depth connection between our human nature and the rights that spring from it, which a just regulation is obligated to recognize. The unborn-from zygote to blastocyst to rudiment to fetus-is the same being, the same substance, that make knowns into an adult. The actualization of a human being's potentials-that is, her "human" appearance and the exercise of her rational and moral powers as an adult-is solely the public presentation of functions latent in each human substance, from the twinkling of an eye it is brought into being. A human may let slip through the fingers and regain those functions completely through her life, but the substance remains unchanged.

As Reagan understood, if one's value is conditioned upon certain accidental properties, then the human equality affirmed by dint of the Declaration and advanced by means of Lincoln-the philosophical foundation of our constitutional regime-is a fiction. In that case there is no principled basis for rejecting the notion that human rights ought to be distributed to individuals upon the basis of native intellectual abilities or other value-giving properties, of the like kind as rationality or self-awareness. single can only reject this notion by the agency of affirming that human beings are intrinsically valuable because they posses a particular nature from the second they come into existence. That is to say, what a human being is, and not what she does, makes her a subdue of rights. But this would mean that, like slavery, the nation ought to discard the right to abortion, for it is as inconsistent with our fundamental principles as was slavery.