It’s actually a donkey on the table

The issue very intelligent politicians and their media allies are adept at ignoring, right at the heart of their rhetorical flourish about civil and human rights for all people, is when human life begins.

Now that the subject has been newly raised in the Saddleback Civil Forum, it’s very much on the table. In this Newsweek online piece, George Weigel asks why Democrats are ignoring it.

Throughout this lengthy campaign, the Democratic Party has worked hard to present itself as the party of intellect, competence and moral seriousness. Yet it’s off to a very rocky start in addressing the substance of the abortion issue—which remains, 35 years after Roe v. Wade, one of the most volatile in our public life. Talk this week by Democratic leaders about lowering the incidence of abortion in America will rightly be welcomed by pro-life Democrats, including the large number of pro-life African-American Democrats. But the recent public record has to make committed pro-lifers of both parties wonder just how serious the Democratic leadership is about engaging the abortion debate.

In the couple of posts below, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent total misrepresentation of Catholic teaching reveals the willful distortion or denial of fact. As did Sen. Obama’s recent comment that defining when life begins is “above my pay grade.”

An embryology text widely used in American medical schools, “The Developing Human,” is not so reticent about the science involved: “Human development begins at fertilization when a male gamete or sperm (spermatazoon) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to produce a single cell—a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” That is the science. It’s quite specific, and understanding the science here is surely not above the “pay grade” of a president who will be making public-policy decisions based on that science.

And that’s very important to get, the fact that the president and other government leaders, along with judges and justices, have some worldview based on some version of values. So we need to ask what informs those values. As pastor Rick Warren said at the open of the Saddleback forum, ‘We believe in the separation of church and state, but that there is no separation of faith and politics.’ The Church instructs hierarchy and lay faithful alike to be morally informed voices in the public square.

As for theology, there are, obviously, theological disagreements on the moral question of abortion. But while a president is not a theological referee, a president ought to have some grasp of the basic philosophical issues that have been vigorously debated in the abortion wars over the past several decades; these, after all, are the issues that should inform public policy.

Here’s a clear and excellent point:

For decades now, pro-life advocates have been arguing, on the basis of reason informed by science, that nothing human was ever anything other than human, and that nothing not human will ever become human. These are things we can know prior to our theological convictions (or lack thereof). Does Senator Obama disagree with these claims?

And this is another incisive and critical point:

There are also serious questions of political theory and governance at stake in the abortion wars. Pro-lifers have long argued that allowing the government to declare an entire class of human creatures—the unborn—outside the protection of the law is a danger for everyone…

That’s the key to it all.

Pro-lifers of both parties—some of them agnostic and atheists—have made genuinely public arguments, based on scientific knowledge, reason and democratic political theory. Judging from the evidence to date, the Democratic candidate for president has yet to engage those arguments seriously.