Piercing the skull
Will Justice Anthony Kennedy’s honest abortion language pierce the veil?
Marvin Olasky

Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me? Wrong. Sharp instruments break the bones of unborn children, but words can also hurt—or help. As our story ("Speaking our language," May 12, 2007) shows, Anthony Kennedy of the Supremes belted out hard-hitting words: "pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain." And, in describing the soft target of abortionist terror, he used the Two Words That Must Not Be Uttered: "unborn child."

As I wrote in Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America, the crucial change in American thinking about abortion came not with Roe v. Wade in 1973 but with the pregnancy of Sherri Finkbine in 1962. Up to then newspapers had referred to abortion's prime victims as babies or children— but when the pretty star of the Phoenix version of Romper Room, a nationally syndicated program for children, decided to abort a child who might have been born with severe birth defects, journalists were sympathetic. The word fetus soon took over. the rest