Abortion. Today the very word implies controversy. Many politicians practically flee in terror at the prospect of having to talk about anything relating to abortion. The topic generally isn't even mentioned in "polite" social settings, for fear of offending someone. Public opinion polls in this country show a nation terribly split, or perhaps splintered, on abortion. A pro-abortion position is established in the law of the United States, which basically mandates the right to get an abortion at any time and for any reason. Abortion is clearly an issue on which there is little or no moral consensus in our culture.

In these circumstances, it is hard to grasp how different the common view of abortion was as recently as the decade before Roe v. Wade. It is informative to examine the definitions and descriptions of abortion as a word in the 1960s. In 1966, Webster's Third New International Dictionary defined abortion, among other definitions referring to miscarriages, as the "criminal expulsion of a human fetus." The current edition of that same dictionary now defines abortion as "the induced expulsion of a human fetus." Naturally, all reference to the criminality of abortion has been removed from the dictionary, because abortion is no longer legally a crime. What is remarkable from our present perspective is that as recently as 1966 the criminality of abortion was so taken for granted by society that abortion was not described as a crime merely in the legal code of this or that jurisdiction, but actually defined as criminal in one of the most authoritative dictionaries of the English language.

In 1967, the Encyclopedia Britannica devoted less than one-seventh of the article on abortion to "deliberate termination of pregnancy (therapeutic abortion)," the rest of the article being taken up with a discussion of different types of miscarriage, which the encyclopedia clearly considered the primary meaning of abortion as a word. The article also states: "In many parts of the world, a person who willfully causes an abortion, as well as anyone who contributes to the act in the absence of medical indications, is liable to conviction of crime." Concerning "therapeutic abortions," the encyclopedia says that they may be done "when the mother's health, life, or reason are seriously jeopardized by the continuation of the pregnancy and when grossly defective offspring may surely be expected." It is clear that the encyclopedia takes seriously the limitation of abortion to serious medical reasons, because it notes, "the frequency of therapeutic terminations of pregnancy is decreasing rapidly with the advances of medical knowledge." How surprised would the author of those words be to discover that, so far from abortion continuing to become rapidly less frequent, more than forty million abortions would be performed in the United States alone in the thirty-five years following the publication of that encyclopedia.

The current edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica provides a sharp contrast: less than one-tenth of the article is now devoted to miscarriages, with the rest providing extensive information about induced abortions. The reasons now given for which abortions may be performed include: "to preserve the life or physical or mental well-being of the mother; to prevent the completion of a pregnancy that has resulted from rape or incest; to prevent the birth of a child with serious deformity, mental deficiency, or genetic abnormality; or to prevent a birth for social or economic reasons." Obviously, some of these reasons are so broad that they effectively describe what is in fact the case in many places: that an abortion can be procured for any reason at all and still be legal, and even be considered morally acceptable by many people.

In well under forty years, both of these reference works have obviously significantly changed, and indeed in a certain sense almost reversed themselves, on the topic of abortion. The point here is not to say that Webster's Third New International Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica have become pro-abortion. I am completely pro-life, but as much as I and other pro-lifers might lament the changes in these books, in this case these secular reference works are basically doing what other secular reference works have done as well, and indeed exactly what one would expect them to do: reflecting changes that have largely occurred in the mindset of our society as a whole. So what can we as a society take from all this, apart from simply the information that the societal views on abortion were very different very recently? A couple of points come to mind.

First, the very rapidity of these changes strengthens the case for slower and more careful reflection in our society about how far we have come and where are going on the issue of abortion. The fact that the pro-life position was almost universally assumed in our country so recently should give everyone pause, and make people think about whether society as a whole may have gone wrong in the process of such rapid change.

Secondly, for pro-lifers: the huge shift that took place so quickly on abortion should give us reasons for both caution and hope. Caution is important because the trends of the last forty years may continue in the next forty years if nothing is done to stop them. Abortion, while it is considered morally permissible by many people, is still widely seen as something negative and unfortunate. Will this still be the case in 2020? The Encyclopedia Britannica currently says of euthanasia: "Because there is no specific provision for it in most legal systems, it is accounted either suicide (if performed by the patient himself) or murder (if performed by another)." Will that kind of sentence still be in any encyclopedia in 2030? In order to make sure that things do not get any worse, and in order to have any chance at all of making moral progress in our culture, pro-lifers must be conscious of and resistant to any continuation of the liberalizing redefinitions of terms and positions that we have seen on abortion since the 1960s.

Finally, however, there is also reason for hope in the pro-life movement, because as dark as the situation may seem, it is possible for things to change quickly in a more positive direction as well. It almost always takes more time to build up than to tear down, so it is probably not realistic to expect that the moral wisdom our culture once had on abortion will be restored as quickly as it was destroyed. However, positive changes are possible, and with the help of God anything is possible.