As crowds gathered in Washington and around the nation this week to protest 35 years of legalized abortion in the United States, there was some encouraging news in a study released last week showing a decline in abortions.

Research conducted by the Guttmacher Institution said the number of abortions declined by nine percent to 1.2 million between 2000 and 2005. The report said this was the lowest level of abortions since 1976 — four years after the 1972 Supreme Court decisions that legalized abortion in the United States.

Responding to the report, Randall K. O’Bannon of the National Right to Life Committee said the report was encouraging, and the numbers of abortions performed are “moving in the right direction.” But he also noted that 1.2 million abortions a year is “still a massive number.”

This large number remains a sad reality, underscoring that while the numbers are declining there are still far too many abortions in a country whose legal system and heritage are premised on the value of all human life. And 35 years after the 1972 Roe and Doe decisions, the challenge remains to recognize in our law and in our attitudes the humanity of the unborn child.

The reality that human life exists in the earliest stages of development continues to be the heart of the abortion issue. Yet in our public dialogue this often becomes obscured by use of terms such as “the right to choose” or “a woman’s choice.” The question is what is being chosen — in this case the destruction of a developing human person — but this question is often overlooked or ignored.

The U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities pointed this out in a 1989 statement.

“The church’s efforts to educate Catholics and others about the evil of abortion begins with the humanity of the unborn child and the continuity of human development from conception to natural death,” the committee said. “This central truth is often obscured in the current debate, where abortion is presented solely as an exercise of personal autonomy or as a conflict between state prerogatives and the individual right of privacy.”

The 1972 Supreme Court decisions on abortion laid the groundwork for this confusion. “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins,” Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in the majority decision in Roe v. Wade. The reason, he said, is that those in the fields of medicine, philosophy and theology were unable to arrive at a consensus.

Yet, as Justice Byron White noted in a dissenting opinion, many states had resolved the “difficult question” mentioned by Blackmun by deciding that unborn human life should be protected. “I cannot accept the court’s exercise of its clear power of choice” by erecting a constitutional barrier to the state’s effort to protect human life, he wrote.

The fact is that we can no longer dismiss the question of when human life begins. With the advances in medical science and medical technology over the past three decades, there are greater insights now about when life begins. The ultrasound technology alone has added an entire new dimension to the existence of human life in the womb. You can see the image of the developing life.

Judge Judith H. Jones of the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals noted in a concurring opinion in a 2004 case that rejected reopening the Roe v. Wade decision that there are reasons for a reconsideration of the Roe ruling. She said developments in neonatal science will continue to “push the frontiers of fetal viability (when the unborn child can live outside the mother’s womb) closer to the date of conception,” and she expressed the hope that the court will “someday acknowledge such developments.”

Reversing the Roe decision remains the objective, as the U.S. bishops emphasized in a statement five years ago. “Roe v. Wade cannot stand as the law of this great nation, a nation founded on the self-evident truth that all people are created with an inalienable right to life,” the bishops said.

They added: “We are committed ... to bringing about a reversal of this tragic Supreme Court decision. We will speak out on behalf of the sanctity of each and every human life, wherever it is threatened, from conception to natural death, and we urge all people of good will to do likewise.”

This remains the task of all people of good will 35 years after Roe became the law of the land.