[Vladimir] Lenin repeatedly expressed utter contempt for the “moral minimum” idea, and his reasoning became the Soviet position on ethics, taught to generations of schoolchildren. To prefer “the smallest number of victims,” “a minimum of mutual embitterment,” and the avoidance of “a single unnecessary drop of blood”—for Lenin, such thinking presumed the absolute value of human life, a doctrine that ultimately derived either from religion or from Kant’s quasi-religious imperative always to treat people as ends, not means. Lenin and Trotsky, who regarded themselves as uncompromising materialists, sneered at the whole idea of “the sanctity of human life”…. Lenin lamented that Bolshevik morality exceeds most people’s capability. Having been educated to regard others as ends rather than means, most people regrettably hesitate before killing; they fret about individual guilt; and they find it difficult to execute children. Torture, public hangings, mass hostage-taking, or destruction of whole cities shocks them. Lenin reproached his subordinates for all these vestiges of religion and bourgeois morality.
–Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
This clinic killed preborn children between the ages of seven weeks and twenty- four weeks. At only three and a half weeks, a child’s heart has begun to beat. By seven weeks, their arms and legs are already beginning to form. Some babies could survive at just twenty-two weeks with medical support. Entering into that clinic, every child within a mother’s womb had a beating heart and a future. Each was as precious and as holy as any other human on earth.
—Lila Rose, Fighting for Life: Becoming a Force for Change in a Wounded World
