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This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning-my country 'tis of thee; sweet land of liberty; of thee I sing.

Those who heard him that day found themselves drawn away from their troubles and toward a vision of the way the world should be. And that is what rhetoric should do: present a case or a story that allows listeners to see anew, to gain a fresh perspective on the matter at hand.

While the goal of rhetoric is to persuade, this is not the only criterion for judging success. If we want to direct the flow of social meaning, we must be sure that our words and stories are in fact connected to the real experiences of people. Our communication has to do with our sense of belonging to a community. Our communion, so to speak, comes through our private and public dialogue about shared hopes and concerns. We must prove, not just say, that we have everybody's interests in mind.

Our task is to use words and stories to create a vision of a prolife world where the least among us is protected and cared for. But we need to capture the public imagination to do so.

Before we talk about how to create that vision, we need to review the evolution of language in the abortion debate during the last 30 years.

In 1962, a story surfaced that would begin a dramatic shift in the way Americans would think about abortion. Before, abortion had been almost universally seen as an act that killed a child and was thus criminal. Afterward, the law prohibiting abortion was perceived as an injustice that denied help to desperate women.

The subject was Sherri Finkbine, the "Romper Room" television host from Phoenix, who loved children and who had four of her own. Not knowing the risk involved, she took her husband's thalidomide tranquilizer while pregnant with her fifth child. It was only later that she read about the horrible deformities caused by the drug.

She sought an abortion with the consent of her doctor and local hospital. But she wanted civil authorities to approve publicly of what she was doing. When she could not get a public statement to that effect, she flew to Sweden, as one newspaper put it, "to find a more civilized attitude toward her plight." And she got the abortion.

Finkbine was intelligent and attractive. Happily married, she represented an American ideal of a nurturing mother and teacher of children. She became a heroine, a moral woman up against an immoral law. A woman who, in Sherri's own words, "couldn't, in all conscience, bring into the world a child whose chances seemed so utterly hopeless."

In the course of telling her story, reporters first referred to Finkbine's unborn child as a baby, but later as a fetus. Parts of the story went unreported: there was only a 20 percent chance that her baby would be deformed at all. And several people offered to adopt her child, no matter what.

A Gallup poll taken shortly after the incident showed that 52 percent of Americans thought she had done the right thing. For the first time, a majority of Americans believed abortion could be a positive act.

In addition to Sherri Finkbine's situation, stories abounded during this period about desperate women taking desperate and often fatal measures to get abortions. Perhaps the most gruesome was the 1962 story about a woman who died during an abortion and was cut up into pieces, bones and flesh, and stuffed down a sewage line.

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January (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47