Follow the argument through…

…to its logical conclusion. Then see if that’s tenable. I say that a lot. That’s why I loved this article in First Things.

You have probably already discovered one distinct advantage of supporting abortion rights if you have loved ones who have had an abortion. It’s just easier. Betray your qualms about the practice in general and they are liable to feel you’ve betrayed them, and then you in turn are liable to feel their resentment. If your sole objective is to avoid social conflict, you might well calculate that the ticket is to keep your thoughts to yourself and say you’re pro-choice.

Expedience is the oxygen politicians run on, but they can’t say that, and so they invoke or invent principles that enable them to pander and call it philosophy. “Government should stay out of the bedroom.” It’s a catchy tune, but the lyrics don’t match the purported theme. Abortion doesn’t take place in the bedroom. Consensual sex does. So does rape. So what are they saying? They’re not saying anything. They’re conjuring a taboo. “Reproductive freedom.” They don’t mean you should be free to reproduce. They mean something almost opposite. They mean you should be able to terminate your child if you reproduced but didn’t mean to, or did mean to but have since changed your mind. Recall the confused mother in South Park who, seeking to spare her eight-year-old son any more of her parental inadequacy, sets out to get abortion made legal through the fortieth trimester.

This blast of clarity is invigorating.

Pare away the politicking and posturing and anti-Catholicism, the circumlocution and the bumper stickers designed to distract us from the train of thought set in motion by the unique and almost unspeakably profound intimacy of the relationship between a pregnant woman and her gestating child—pare all that away and what remains is the opinion that what is wrong with the effort to enshrine in law your right to life is that by itself it’s unbalanced. You also have a right to die, which, when you were literally an infant (that is, incapable of speech, of articulating your right to anything), you required a proxy to weigh and consider. That was your mother. What could possibly be the rationale for designating anybody else?

Which is why the South Dakota legislation in the “Women’s Health and Human Life Protection Law” advanced as far as it did….because it named and claimed the constitutional right of the woman’s relationship to her unborn child, her right to determine what’s best for that child, and to have the information to decide for both.

Now this is good. Follow it carefully…

What has since become the operative, though largely tacit, argument for abortion rights did not figure in Justice Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v. Wade, which stipulates your right to abortion only in the active voice. As for your right to have been aborted, or not, the Court in Roe was silent. But follow its conclusion (not its argument, which is shaky, but its conclusion, which is firm) down to its logical roots. Your right to have been born was already established or at any rate never in question. Your right to have been aborted was what was contested. To secure that, you have to accept some restriction on your corresponding right to life. It’s not absolute. Those twin rights, your right to live and your right to die, are equal under the law and are equally subordinated to the mother’s right to choose between them.

Ever hear it put that way? No. This argument is never engaged by abortion activists.

Think about it…

At any given moment, you are exercising either your right to life or your right to die. They are mutually exclusive, and the state cannot remedy that. The most it can do is guarantee the right that both descend from—the right to choose between them, to choose one and reject the other. Acting in what she deemed to be my interest, my mother made for me my choice for life, just as it would have been through her that my sister, had she been aborted, made her choice for death.

Despite broad public support for the abortion-euthanasia nexus, at least in hard cases such as Terri’s Schiavo’s, our right to die is not an agenda item anyone running for president in this age of Jihad and terror alerts wants us to think he would feel particularly motivated to promote from the bully pulpit. But the right to die happens to be the ground of the right to abort. Abortion rights come with the soil they are planted in, and the politician who brings them into his campaign brings in the whole plot. Everyone understands that, even if the understanding never rises to the surface.

Emphasis was added there, because it needs to be emphasized for clarity of thought and argument. Especially as it has entered presidential politics.

And so voters who don’t see it are still able to sense it, however dimly, this inconsistency between Giuliani’s tough talk about confronting the enemy and his flustered talk about protecting your right to choose. The inconsistency between the toughness and the fluster is only the surface expression of the fundamental inconsistency between his assertion that he would carry out America’s iron will to defend itself and his implication that he supports your personal right to curl up in the fetal position and die if that’s what you want. The advance of the pro-choice hawk is impeded to the degree that his two wings work against each other. Part of what made Reagan compelling was that his foreign and his domestic policy taken together were morally coherent.

Brilliant analogy. Great conclusion:

The percentage of its base that the Republican party would disappoint and perhaps lose outright if Giuliani were its presidential nominee is hard to estimate, but it is natural to wonder whether it would be to the GOP what Reagan Democrats and dovish, seamless-garment pro-lifers have been to the Democratic party for a generation now—a missing component of its natural constituency, a player without whom it has not been able to win a majority of the vote in a national election.

Read the whole article. Then print it out and take it others in this political season of slippery logic and evasive rhetoric. Ask the tough questions, and expect clear answers. We need critical thinking now as much as ever.