Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation by Ronald Reagan

Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation Reviews

• 
  Jon Nakapalau

  I read this book because both my liberal and conservative friends use the same term to describe it: turning point. After SCOTUS came down with the reversal of Roe v Wade I found myself asking several questions about how we arrived here. No political commentary here; whatever side you take on this issue I think it is important to understand the process that takes place when movements ripple across our nation and crest in dissension. I predict this will not be the last controversial ruling SCOTUS will hand down.
• 
  Daniel

  Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation is an historically important document and one of the most passionate and well-argued pro-life essays ever written. The publication of such an essay by a President while in office (and in his first term, no less) was unheard of, but the knowledge that some 15 million unborn children had been aborted in the first ten years after abortion was legalized in this country compelled Ronald Reagan to do something to put an end to a practice doing irreparable harm to both families and the entire nation. The essay is a short but brilliant condemnation of abortion. The issue affects all of us, Reagan insists, because the diminishment of the life of the unborn diminishes the value of all human life. He exposes the ugly underside of the pro-abortion "quality of life" argument, likening it to slavery, drawing parallels between the Roe vs. Wade decision and the Dred Scot decision that divided Americans over a century earlier. The "quality of life" argument is an argument for quality control of the population, according to Reagan. It says that some human lives are worthless and thus deserving of death; as such, it is a dark echo of the Holocaust which has now inconceivably been endowed with the quality of "mercy." Legalized abortion, Reagan makes clear, put America at the top of a very slippery slope. Not only are unborn babies being killed because they are not wanted, many are killed because of defects - someone decides that such a child would be a burden on the parents and family or the child will not be able to live a "normal" life. Such babies are dubbed useless and without value by the abortionist proponents and are thus denied the human rights our Founding Fathers promised every American. Just as slaves were denied the value of their human lives in America's past, "useless" unborn babies are now being denied that same value of human life.
  
  Such arbitrary evaluation of unborn lives must stop, Reagan says. Such thinking leads naturally to further crimes such as infanticide. Such a case the previous year served to compel Reagan to write this very essay. The courts of Indiana had allowed "Baby Doe" to starve to death after his birth because the child had Down's Syndrome. In essence, retardation had been equated to a crime, one which deserved the death penalty. No nation can survive and prosper when a group of individuals can look at a child and declare whether that child has any value as a human being. The core of Reagan's forceful argument is to be found here: America has two choices. It can be a nation wherein some human lives are declared to be of no value, or it can be a nation who protects and defends the sanctity of all life. We cannot survive as a free nation, Reagan declares, "when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide." That is the core of Reagan's eloquent and insightful essay.
  
  I cannot speak to the accompanying articles in the new addition of this book, as they differ from those in my older edition. Reagan's essay, though, is one of the most powerful and logical anti-abortion arguments in the library of pro-life advocates. More timely than ever, this is an essay that all Americans should read and ponder over.
• 
  R

  WOW!
• 
  Jason Mccool

  Although I grew up with Reagan as President and always appreciated his presidency politically, and although I knew that he was strongly pro-life as I grew up in the pro-life movement (thanks to my mom), I never knew that he had written on the subject until recently. After learning that, I promptly ordered a copy off Amazon and got a used, former library copy (complete with old-school library checkout card with the dates and names of the people that had checked it out, like how library books were when I was a kid). It's a good book, although I should note that Reagan didn't really write a book, per se; he wrote an essay that was then combined with 2 other essays to make this short book. This is only 95 small-format pages with plenty of white space and a good 7-page introduction, so it's a quick read cover to cover. But in spite of its small size, it's good content. I mentioned that two other essays helped fill out the book. They are "The Slide to Auschwitz" by former US Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, and "The Humane Holocaust" by Malcolm Muggeridge.
  
  Ronald Reagan, C. Everett Koop, and Malcom Muggeridge - that's three big names stepping up to the plate to denounce abortion. Reagan, in his typical simple, common-sense eloquence, makes a cumulative case in the first 23 pages after the introduction. He draws on legal history of Supreme Court decisions, improvements in scientific knowledge that were laid out in Congressional testimony in 1981, moral intuitions (like that if you're uncertain if a person is alive or not, you don't try burying them, you err on the side of caution), and basic ethical concerns (devaluing life for one group opens the door for that to be applied to other groups). Koop brings good insight as a pediatric surgeon to the bioethics question of prenatal diagnosis of birth defects and the subsequent question of "quality of life" versus sanctity of life in his 32-page essay. He and Muggeridge both take sobering looks at the history of the debate and how it played out in Germany even before the infamous Nazi regime. Unfortunately, it's usually only the final act that catches our attention, but they explains how the foundation for the Nazi atrocities were only the end result of prior decisions in the realm of medical ethics. Is there "life unworthy of life"? Can we as all-too-fallible human beings, often with unquestioned biases that we only recognize in hindsight years later, ever hope to decide such a question correctly every time? No, and when we try, we slide into Auschwitz, as Koop puts it, or we condemn the Nazis at Nuremberg for their holocaust as we kill far more in our abortion holocaust than they ever could in all their evil machinations, as Muggeridge points out.
  
  If you are already pro-life, this is definitely a good book to add to your library. There's some good quotes in there I haven't come across elsewhere. And if you're not pro-life, I'd encourage you to read it as well and work through the logic of each of these author's cases. Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and you may very well find yourself helping to defend the lives of the most vulnerable among us and speaking out for those who cannot speak for themselves.
• 
  Gator

  “In life-denying terms, as we have seen, compassion easily becomes a holocaust; garden suburbs and gulags derive from the same quest for quality of life, and the surgeon’s knife can equally be used to sustain and extinguish life.”
  
  Food for thought? Yes.
  Worth the read? Yes.
  Good conservative read? Yes.
• 
  Kevin Stilley

  A poignant reminder of why we can never grow apathetic about the greatest moral crisis of our age.
• 
  Katie

  I LOVED this one. And I love Ronald Reagan. So precise & beautifully heartbreaking. 🤍
• 
  Christopher Hunt

  When this book was written, it must have inspired real hope in the readers that were fighting against the holocaust of abortion in the United States. A sitting president wrote a book against the unjust murder of babies that befan after Roe v Wade. He is energetic and hopeful in this book, just as he was whenever you saw him giving a talk, interview or speech.
  
  Reading it decades after the fact, it seems a sad naïveté. It felt the same as reading Jacques Maritain with all of his hope for the future of the UN, which he played such a grande role in forming. Or Pope St. John Paul II’s letter the nations of the Americas, with all of the great ideas and expectations of unity and goodness. Reading the hope and expectation of these three gentlemen concerning their fellow, our fellow human beings, and seeing the outcome, is disheartening in hindsight. “What if’s” are a fruitless game, so I leave off here, and say that I am certainly glad I read this and the other books I mentioned. And I am melancholy just in recalling them to write this review.
• 
  Alison

  This book is really good. It talks about abortion and why it is so terrible. Ronald Reagan is very passionate in his essay, and I admire him for that. He compares abortion to slavery, how both dehumanize certain people. He makes some really good points on how terrible abortion is.
  It was interesting reading this essay. Mr. Reagan was a very good writer.
• 
  John Yelverton

  This book is an amazing work that is both succinct and elegant at the same time. Ronald Reagan lays everything on the line and makes it very hard to argue with his political and historical observations on the matter in hand.
• 
  Mateus Buzzo

  Great... this is just great! We all know that Reagan was the last best president the US had, and you don't need to be American to know that, but we also know that being a Republican, he trigged plenty of controversy, specially with those who believe in liberal politics (in an American pattern, FYI).

  
  

  Obviously, by being a Republican and writing this essay (not by himself all alone, it's important to cite) during his first presidency, this is an anti-abortion, pro-life and sometimes Christian essay on how abortion can be cruel and how we, the people, should defend unborn lives and life in general.
  Reagan is clear when he says that by diminishing the life of the unborn, you diminish the value of all human life and he even compares abortion to slavery in the US and Nazism in Germany due to the fact that slaves and Jews were denied their own lives.

  
  

  Reagan addresses moral intuitions (this includes religion) and ethical issues, but also he relies on American politics and scientific knowledge to condemn abortion.
  Still, this is not an easy subject to discuss. I can say that I am pro-choice because if I defend individual liberties (including the right to bear arms), I would be the one-of-a-kind hypocrite if I were against abortion. However, I also can say that I am pro-life because, as he explained, there are plenty of people using the abortion excuse to get rid of defective children and using the "quality of life" speech but the truth is we really don't know if a so-called defective child will or will not have a good quality of life. And finally, the Catholic speech (I am Catholic, Reagan was Presbyterian at the time of his passing), if God sent us to this world, defective or not, we have a purpose.

  
  I'm still in favor of abortion if the life of the woman is at a risk or if the child is fruit of a rape. God doesn't approve violence and raping is one of the worst, if not the worst, types of violence a woman can be submitted to. Not even my faith would make me disapprove abortion on these cases.
  Anyway, this is a good conservative reading written by a good conservative president, although my way of conservatism is way more British and Canadian than American one, still this is a strong advocacy for anti-abortion in the United States and conservative people overall. Highly recommended.
• 
  Cole Shiflet

  Very good.
  
  "Regrettably, we live at a time when some persons do not value all human life. They want to pick and choose which individuals have value."
  
  "Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide."
• 
  Tony Haws

  “But I cannot understand why the other people... don’t cry out. I am concerned about this, because when the first 273,000 German aged, infirm and retarded were killed in gas chambers there was no outcry from the medical profession either, and it was not far from there to Auschwitz.” Can this happen here in the US? It already is.
• 
  Michael Jolls

  Short, simple and to the point. A collection of three essays (Regan's being the longest) are quite profound in their wisdom and history.
• 
  Nick Bell

  I actually cried while reading this book. You can feel his regret and his passion and compassion for those being killed.
• 
  Travis

  Excellent discussion on the importance of protecting life. Main take away, The real question is, what is the value of human life?
• 
  Diane Mayernik

  A brief look into a president's convictions and his fight to protect all innocent American lives. He was a Pro-life champion, and believed in the true meaning of those famous words in the Declaration of Independence that state: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". He felt that these words were never truer than when related to the basic human right to be born. I love how he writes about the "sanctity of human life" vs the so-called "quality of human life" arguments. This nation was founded on equality, and therefore that principle clearly validates the sanctity of all human life. Ronald Reagan was a true American. He fought for life. I only wish I had been old enough to vote for him.
• 
  Rebecca Driver

  A deeply unimpressive argument against abortion.
  
  “The real question today is not when human life begins, but, ‘What is the value of human life?’” No, that is a crucial part of the debate and not addressing it is a serious flaw in Reagan’s argument.
  
  Also, he says, “It is not for us to decide who is worthy to live and who is not,” but Reagan approved of the death penalty, which is literally deciding that a criminal is not worthy to live.
  
  Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t touch at all on how pregnancy wrecks a woman’s body, and pretends that a baby just pops into existence without any issues.
  
  This is obviously a brief review and I only include the two above quotations because they especially stuck out to me. Overall, Reagan’s essay is prettily written but uncompelling.
  
  Note: I did not read the afterword.
• 
  Milan Homola

  I found this beauty at a thrift store. Very refreshing and bold. Super interesting to see the main concepts vocabulary etc surrounding the topic in 1983. So neat to see a sitting President write an essay making a clear moral point without political watering down. Reagan's words are short clear and to the point. "The real question today is not when human life begins, but, What is the value of human life?" And "We will never recognize the true value of our own lives until we affirm the value in the life of others." The book also has two great afterwords essays
• 
  John-Paul

  "The real question today is not when human life begins, but, What is the value of human life?" Ronald Reagan
  
  Well said, Mr. President, well said!
• 
  booklady

  On its way...
• 
  Karen Linton

  A must-read for any Conservative.
• 
  Lisa

  Well written and thought provoking. Reagan and those who wrote the afterwords (back in 1984) seemed to believe that Roe v. Wade would be overturned long before now. Sad that it still stands.