Can legalisation of abortion be reversed?

Is the pro-life lobby only concerned with unborn babies? The answer is a definite no. The lobby is concerned about the mothers who abort. Research and experience also show that many of these women prove to be the victims of their own actions. The abortions they commit haunt them for many years. Some of these suffer alone. Others become anti-abortionists and lobby for their newly adopted cause.

It was recently announced that the two women who were plaintiffs in the Roe and Doe decisions of 1973, in which the US Supreme Court effectively struck down all state laws restricting abortion, have now joined in asking the courts to reverse their decisions.

Sandra Cano, the "Mary Doe" of the Doe v. Bolton case, has filed her motion to set aside that ruling in Atlanta. "I'm going back to court to right a wrong," she said. "Abortion has hurt millions of women," she added, "and I regret my role."

A similar motion by Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, was filed on June 17. Her motion is currently pending before the Court of Appeals of the 5th Circuit and is headed to the US Supreme Court.

Cano and McCorvey both regret their individual roles in Doe and Roe and seek to reverse their cases, which brought abortion on demand and its tragic effects to America.

"The truth is that I did not seek or want an abortion. I was young, uninformed, and in a difficult situation," Cano said. "Not once in the process was I given an opportunity to speak, and no judge or attorney in court asked me how I felt about abortion," she said.

Cano says her case was based on lies and deception.

Cano and McCorvey were originally brought before the Supreme Court as women who needed abortions in order to protect or improve their lives. Now they return to the Supreme Court as representatives of the women who have been exploited and injured by the abortion industry. McCorvey once worked at an abortion clinic and now believes, with Cano, that abortion is a safety hazard, not a safety net.

Over a thousand women who have suffered severe physical and/or emotional problems related to their abortions have provided sworn statements in support of Cano and McCorvey's motions.

Can it be that the witness and actions of these and many other women will bring our culture to its senses regarding the massacres of the unborn that go on regularly in so many countries?

One hopes that it should, especially since science is on the side of the pro-life arguments. The cover story of the June 9 issue of Newsweek asks: "Should a fetus have rights?" It then goes on to note: "How science is changing the debate." The headlines are accompanied by a photo of an unborn child in the womb; inside the magazine are similar pictures.

Those might seem like remarkable words and images from a secular magazine until we recognise that more and more people and institutions are beginning to assent to the reality of human life in the womb and to follow that reality to its logical conclusion: the end of abortion.

It has not always been so. For the decades that abortion has been legal pro-abortionists kept on denying that human life begins at conception, refuse to hear the beating heart in the womb, and accept the myth of phrases like "mass of tissues" and "a woman's body".

Throughout those same decades, pro-life people have been warning that abortion is on an inevitable collision course with science. As the unborn child is photographed in utero, as surgeons operate on babies before birth and as DNA demonstrates how unique each of us is, it becomes more and more difficult to cling to the notion that there is nothing significant about destruction of the human being before birth.

There are indications that in some countries public opinion is beginning to swing more and more away from abortion. Science and abortion collide every time parents see their child's face on a computer screen during a sonogram, print out the image and post the results on their refrigerator. That image is not of an 'it'.

Each time men and women gaze lovingly at those images and give them names, abortion is mortally wounded. Those parents know they cannot abort someone whose face they recognize, and it's becoming tougher for them to argue that others should.