c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Frederica Mathewes-Green is a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. She is the author of the recent book”Real Choices”and is a member of the board of the National Women’s Coalition for Life and a frequent contributor to Christianity Today magazine.)

(RNS)-In the aftermath of President Clinton’s veto of the partial-birth abortion bill, one word hangs ringing in the air: infanticide.

In a rare joint statement, eight Roman Catholic cardinals charged that the act would not merely allow”children, almost completely born, to be killed brutally.”The veto would point toward the future as well.”It moves our nation one step further toward acceptance of infanticide,”the cardinals wrote.

At the time of the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, slippery-slope predictions like this were scorned. It was presumed that abortion was an act of last resort and, as such, would be used rarely and only in the most desperate circumstances. The reluctant taking of human life would be confined to a handful of unfortunate cases.

Twenty-three years later that handful has doubled; 750,000 children were aborted the first year, more each subsequent year, and by 1981 the rate had risen to a steady 1.5 million a year, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute. Familiarity breeds more of the same.

Abortion worked so well in solving pregnancy problems that euthanasia began to look like an effective treatment at the other end of life. The same issues of privacy and personal liberty used to defend abortion rights are now being cited in court arguments over physician-assisted suicide.

Death has turned out to be one more tool in the physician’s bag of tricks, and it’s an effective one, like a mallet on a housefly. Once killing has been turned into an act of compassion, it seems foolish and old-fashioned not to use it whenever needed.

Does this sound like a slippery slope? Did we slide down it without noticing? It’s obvious that in the last two decades the brutality of our culture has increased. The nightly local news is a litany of murders. Entertainment violence continues to push the boundaries of nausea. Abortion promised to end child abuse by ending unwanted children, but since 1976 the rate of reported child abuse has increased 50 times, from 60,000 per year to 60,000 per week, according to the child abuse prevention organization ChildHelp USA.

Maybe that’s just coincidence. But the decision to kill unborn children hasn’t led to increased safety for the born ones. Nor has it accompanied an increase in civility or security for everybody else.

If this is a slippery slope, could infanticide lie at the bottom? Well, why not? It has been said that every good argument for abortion is a good argument for infanticide. All the reasons for placing the unborn outside the circle of protection-size, helplessness, self-awareness, ability to communicate-apply equally well to newborns. In fact, some proponents of abortion have already made the connection.

In her 1989 book”Soul Crisis”(Signet), Sue Nathanson likens a woman’s abortion decision to the stories of Abraham and Agamemnon, each of whom heard a call to kill a beloved child. It makes no difference to Nathanson’s argument that those children were already born; the principle is the same.

Surprisingly, the founders of the early feminist movement would have agreed in identifying abortion with child murder; they used the terms, along with”infanticide,”interchangeably, and condemned them all. Susan B. Anthony wrote,”I deplore the horrible crime of child murder … no matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton also condemned abortion as”infanticide.”She put it in a nutshell:”When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.” The slippery slope has to do with treating people as property, and presuming that death is a tool a property-owner may use in resolving problems. Does infanticide lie at the bottom of this slope? Not necessarily. That may be merely one more milestone. The bottom could be even worse.

LJB END GREEN