Abortion has become firmly entrenched in American society. To many voters on both sides this is the only important issue. Abortion has become almost a "sacrament" to feminists.

Claiming a constitutional "right to privacy" or the woman's "right to control her own body" shows the lengths to which advocates are willing to abandon logic, for there is no such constitutional right, and it is the unborn infant's "body" most affected. Others propose abortion to limit population growth or contain welfare costs. Historically, it was championed as a way to promote a favored race. While 4000 will die today from abortion in America, other countries have an even more callous view. Surely the practice of killing unborn children has entered the mainstream of societal, although not necessarily majority, thought.

No doubt justification of this behavior is the desire to retain sexual freedom without personal responsibility. But evolutionary thinking and the refusal to acknowledge accountability to a Creator God who created mankind (even pre-born babes) lies at the very core. Scientists state that since animals sometimes induce abortions, such behavior must be acceptable in humans; the "higher animal." With such faulty thinking and lame excuses used to justify sin, we might ask, "What comes next, infanticide'''

An article in the science magazine Discover (September '96), discusses this possibility, detailing the history of the relatively new field of sociobiology. This evolution-based discipline attempts to apply animal behavior to human society. The leading proponent of this view is Dr. E. O. Wilson of Harvard University, a well known evolutionary humanist.

The crux of the article was the work of his former student Dr. Sarah Hardy, who twenty-five years ago studied the practice of infanticide in the langurs (primates) of India. She had observed that when a new male gains leadership of a group of females, he will kill the infant of the ousted leader, allowing the females to bear his own offspring.

The discussion reviewed her theories and others who followed, but the most chilling aspect was the possible use of this animal behavior as a model for human behavior. The article's author, Dr. Carl Zimmer, stopped short of advocating human infanticide, but clearly the issue was raised and not discarded. Those who today practice infanticide were discussed without condemnation. A comparison to the disparity in frequency of child-killing between biological fathers and step-fathers was made. Nowhere was the practice of infanticide condemned, and, of course, no mention was made of it as a sin.

The article did speculate on the various reasons why langurs (and other animals) choose to kill their young, and comparisons were made to human situations. The reader is left to shudder at the thought of the possibilities, but be numbed to its consequences, by greater familiarity with it.

One only has to look at Hitler's Germany to recognize similarities. Atrocities escalated until unthinkable things were attempted. It is my conviction that the trends in this country are the same. A wholesale turnover of politicians, media elite, and education theorists would help to stem the tide. The groundwork has already been laid, the damage may have already been done. We will soon reap even more awful fruits of evolutionary thinking, unless we go "Back to Genesis."

* Dr. John Morris is President of ICR.