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Among prolifers searching for new avenues to stimulate public engagement on abortion, the most significant concern is whether the Congressional hearings will make a difference. "The possibilities for the administration to cover up what is going on are substantial," Cizik warns. The administration has pressed for publicly funded fetal research throughout the 1990s, maintaining that everything would proceed in an ethically acceptable manner.

Cizik is troubled that the issue may not be discussed fully in a Congressional hearing. He bases this concern on an incident from April 1998. During a briefing in the Roosevelt Room, President Clinton told evangelical leaders that his administration opposed legislation protecting religious freedom overseas because such a law would lead the "bowels of the bureaucracy" at the State Department to "fudge the facts" about religious persecution.

After observing six presidential administrations, Cizik says, this was the first time he had personally seen a sitting American president publicly admit that "our own civil servants will break the law if it suits their purposes."

So far, no one at the House Commerce Committee has talked precisely about what the committee plans. But Right to Life's Johnson thinks that House hearings into the trafficking of fetal body parts may help Americans understand some of the real costs of the current abortion situation. "I suspect that the majority of Americans, a substantial majority, would be repulsed by an order form that says I want this organ harvested within ten minutes."

Johnson compares it to the reported practice within China of executing prisoners according to the transplant organs needed. Cizik observes that the hearings "will reveal just how jaundiced we've become as a society to the taking of human life.

"If the public yawns, then it will be evidence that we have indeed become inured to murder for profit. It is entirely plausible that the scales have been so tipped that nothing will outrage us anymore," Johnson says.

But with abortion on the agenda of the Supreme Court, Congress, and candidates in the November presidential election, the prolife community has an unusual opening to spur the American public to rethink the view that abortion is a necessary evil and that fetal tissue from abortion merits respect, but not protection.

Conservative columnist Mona Charen wrote recently about trafficking in fetal bodies: "Some practical souls will probably swallow hard and insist that, well, if these babies are going to be aborted anyway, isn't it better that medical research should benefit?

"No. This isn't like voluntary organ donation. This reduces human beings to the level of commodities."

Additional coverage of this topic is available in The Alberta Report, AbortionTV, World Magazine, and Insight.

Denyse O'Leary's other articles for Christianity Today include:

No Room in the Womb? | Couples with high-risk pregnancies face the 'selective reduction' dilemma. (Dec. 10, 1999)
Embryo 'Adoption' Matches Donors and Would-be Parents | 'Snowflake' program is only of its kind in dealing with leftover fertilized eggs. (Nov. 2, 1999)
Human Embryo Research Resisted (August 9, 1999)
Embryo Research Contested (May 24, 1999)

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March 6 2000, Vol. 44, No. 3