Between Two Worlds

The New York Times runs a story today entitled "Anti-Abortion Leaders Size Up GOP Candidates." The author, Robin Toner, writes that pro-lifers in the GOP are more than a little nervous about this year's presidential election. It's hard to argue with her about that. I know it's still the middle of summer 2007, but it's hard to think that the field is going to change much before the primaries start this January. And right now, pro-lifers are having a hard time finding a solid candidate.

The real worry among many pro-lifers, according to the NYT, is that the GOP will nominate Rudy Giuliani, who is openly pro-choice on abortion. Here's a sobering paragraph:

Hadley Arkes, a professor at Amherst College and a leading social conservative legal thinker, said he had recently gotten “feelers” from some in the Giuliani camp. But Mr. Arkes, an opponent of abortion, said he could not fathom a way the party could nominate Mr. Giuliani and remain the same “pro-life” party it has been for 25 years. “You change the constituency of the party,” Mr. Arkes said — either by showing that anti-abortion voters are not necessary to win, or by showing that anti-abortion voters are willing to subsume their cause to other issues.

What happens, exactly, if 2008 turns out to be the year that the Republican Party becomes convinced that it can win elections without being pro-life?

P.S. Thanks to Justin for handing over the keys to his car for a few days! We promise to stay within the speed limit.....

Frank Beckwith, in the course of an interview largely about his conversion to Roman Catholicism, talks about his upcoming book on abortion. Having read and been significantly helped by his earlier book, Politically Correct Death, I'm looking forward to this one as well:

IgnatiusInsight.com: This fall Cambridge University Press will be publishing your book, Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice, which is described as "the most comprehensive defense of the prolife position on abortion ever published." Would you like to give it a shameless plug and tell readers what is unique about the book and what you hope to accomplish with it?

Dr. Beckwith: You gotta love publishers! Now to the shameless plug. Some of your readers may know of my 1993 book, Politically Correct Death: Answering the Argument for Abortion Rights (Baker Book House). Defending Life was originally going to be a revised edition of that book. But since so much has been written over the past decade on abortion, and because Politically Correct Death did not cover some issues and was a bit outdated, I decided to just write a whole new book. Defending Life covers not only the popular arguments for abortion, but also some of the most sophisticated cases offered by abortion-choice advocates in the academy. I deal extensively with the arguments of thinkers like David Boonin (author of A Defense of Abortion [Cambridge University Press, 2002]) and Judith Jarvis Thomson on issues of fetal personhood and the mother's obligation to her unborn child. But I also deal with the paucity of the legal case for Roe v. Wade, the cloning and stem-cell research debate, and whether prolife religious citizens have the right to shape laws in a liberal democracy, none of which I addressed in Politically Correct Death. Although Defending Life covers sophisticated arguments offered by professional philosophers and bioethicists, the publisher believes that because it is clearly written and includes sections on popular arguments, it will be marketing the book to an audience broader than academics and scholars. In fact, the publisher asked me to place the book's footnotes as endnotes in order to make the text attractive to non-scholars. I, of course, said yes.

What I hope to accomplish with the book is this: I want to offer my colleagues as well as the general public an intelligent, clearly articulated, and non-polemical defense of the prolife position on abortion that does not rely on theological or religious arguments. I also want to help college students and my friends in the prolife movement so that they are better equipped to deal with the best arguments offered by our fellow citizens who do not share our point of view.

What started as a senior thesis in a filmmaking class at Rice University has turned into a documentary, Unborn in the USA: Inside the War on Abortion, that has unprecedented access to the pro-life movement, including groups like Focus on the Family and Justice for All.

The reviews seem fairly positive, many of them pointing to the evenhandedness of the directors:

Slate Magazine: "If I had to guess, I would say the filmmakers are challenging the pro-choice movement to recognize that its opponents are people of deep conviction, and to examine its own beliefs in the harshest possible light."

Slant Magazine: "Flmmakers Stephen Fell and Will Thompson, having gained unprecedented access to the inner workings of pro-life groups across the country, have created an ungainly, distracted, but nonetheless fair-minded look at people who actively work to chip away at Roe v. Wade. . . . Unborn in the USA will not change your mind about abortion, but it will make pro-choicers think differently about people who actively work to stop it from happening."

New York Magazine: "Where do Fell and Thompson stand? With the exception of one title card—in which they demolish a woman's emotional assertion that having an abortion gave her breast cancer—they are rigorously objective. I'm sad to say that through the eyes of the movie's subjects the pro-choice activists come off as glib, unfeeling, and profane. The most harrowing sequence is saved for the end: A young woman becomes so distraught by the sight of these pictures that she slaps the minister who engages her and is taken away in handcuffs. But whatever your views on abortion (mine are extremely tangled), you need to hear the subjects of this film, if only to be able to fight them more effectively."

New York Times: "The documentary 'Unborn in the USA' is billed as a rigorously objective look at the anti-abortion movement, and that's accurate — but only to a point. The people who are the filmmakers' subjects are passionate, sometimes intemperate and often in-your-face aggressive, and the movie's topic is a powder keg regardless."

TV Guide: "Fell and Thompson rarely introduce the voices of pro-choice advocates, allowing antiabortionists the chance to speak uninterrupted and, as often as not, hang themselves with their own ropes."

Today’s New York Times reports: “About 90 percent of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis have chosen to have an abortion.”

Denny Burk:

This clash is not about “preventing disability.” That’s a euphemism that every rational person should reject. It’s about whether or not we should execute disabled persons before they can become a “burden” to their parents and society.

On this issue Christians must offer a prophetic word to the culture. All people are created in God’s image (including people with Down Syndrome) and are thereby to be treated with the dignity that God commands towards those who bear His image. To kill innocent humans because they are inconvenient or unwanted is an assault on the image of God.

A just community does not execute people who are financial and emotional burdens to their families or to society. On the contrary, a just community tries to find ways to care for them. Why would we treat people with Down Syndrome any differently?

From my reading, I would say that Slate.com's Will Saletan is one of the most fairminded, thoughtful writers who favors abortion and seeks to understand the arguments of his opponents.

His latest article is on the recent SCOTUS decision on partial-birth abortion and the impact of the ultrasound machine on the future of the debate. Here's an excerpt:

Pro-lifers are often caricatured as stupid creationists who just want to put women back in their place. Science and free inquiry are supposed to help them get over their "love affair with the fetus." But science hasn't cooperated. Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn't want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we.

Read the whole thing.

(HT: Al Mohler)

Hadley Arkes, the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College, and one of the authors of the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act, is one of the great moral-legal philosophers of our time. In this article he speculates about the next small steps that may result from the recent Supreme Court decision on partial-birth abortion. Here's an excerpt:

In India, the use of sonograms has penetrated even poor areas, and brought the beginnings of a demographic crisis: Families anxious for sons have been altogether too willing to abort female babies. And given the sensibility of the time, the disposition of the government in India has not been to ban the killing of babies based on their gender, but rather to forbid clinics to make the information available. Of all things, we are hearing denunciations of these multinational capitalist firms, like General Electric, which do such underhanded things as to produce the equipment that gives people such information about their unborn children.

The next plausible move, then, is to bring back the scheme of banning any abortion performed on the basis of the sex of the child. My hunch is that that position, too, would command a large level of support in the public, comparable to the level of support for banning partial-birth abortion, and it too would recruit people who call themselves “pro-choice.”

But if legislators could take that modest move of banning abortions on the basis of sex, the public mind could be prepared for reasoning about the next step: barring abortions based on the disability of the child. In surveys in the past, more than half of the public were opposed to aborting a child if the child was likely to be born deaf. The opposition seemed to be invariant by the period of gestation. My own reading was that, if people thought it was wrong to kill someone because of his deafness, they did not think that the wrong varied with the age of the victim.

Here the legislatures could invoke the body of their laws dealing with discriminations against the disabled. And then perhaps they could get to the point of banning abortions after the onset of a beating heart. One survey recently found that about 62 percent of the public would support that kind of restriction. It is worth noticing, too, that in none of these cases except that of the beating heart would the legislation start offering protections based on trimesters or the age of the child. There would be no need to play along, and confirm, the perverse fiction that the child becomes more human somewhere in this scale of age, or that it is legitimate to kill smaller people with reasons less compelling than the reasons we would need in killing larger people.

In the most curious way, then, a decision so narrow, so begrudging and limited, may invite a series of measures simple and unthreatening, but the kinds of measures that gather force with each move. We need to remind ourselves that we have seen such things before. We may recall, in that vein, the Emancipation Proclamation. It was limited, as a war measure. For Lincoln did not have the authority to strip people of what was then their lawful property in slaves. The Proclamation freed only those slaves held in areas that were in rebellion against the government. It did not cover the slaves held in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri. And yet ... it was understood instantly and widely in the country that this measure had an “anti-slavery impulse.”

(HT: STR)

The decision on Wednesday, in Gonzales v. Carhart, was severely limited and diminished in its practical effects. But rightly or wrongly, there may be a sense that the decision opens the doors now; that it invites legislators and political men and women to deliver themselves from the reign of judges, and set their hands to this task once again.

“This is about a procedure that any parent would want her daughter to have access to if she needed it. And to frame it as an abortion issue is doing a disservice to medicine and to our young women and our country. So I hope we can get the focus back on the fact that this Supreme Court is deciding what medical procedures are necessary for child-bearing women.”
--Quoted in San Francisco Chronicle.

(HT: Denny Burk)

Joe Carter is posting some entries on PBA:

• The Infanticide Procedure: Doctors Describe Performing Partial Birth Abortions
• The Infanticide Procedure: Part II -- Responding to Objections to the PBA Ban

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today on Gonzales v. Carhart, 05-380 and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, 05-1382, upholding a nationwide ban on partial-birth abortion. The Justices voted 5-4 to retain the ban. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, John Paul Stevens, and David Souter dissented.

Bloomberg: "The law, which has never taken effect, is the first federal abortion restriction since the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established the constitutional right to end a pregnancy."

Here are some articles from Stand to Reason about partial-birth abortion:

• Partial-birth Abortion Isn't about Abortion
• Paritial-birth Aobrtion: Objections and Misunderstandings
• Nothing Hidden in D&X

The Drudge Report has reactions from the presidential candidates:

Hillary: 'Erosion of our constitutional rights'...
Giuliani: 'I agree with it'...
Obama: 'I strongly disagree'...
Romney: 'A step forward'...
McCain: I'm very happy...
Edwards: 'I could not disagree more strongly'...

Time Magazine: "Two companies—Care Net and Heartbeat International—serve three-fourths of the crisis pregnancy centers in the U.S. Unknown and unaffiliated a few decades ago, such centers now outnumber abortion providers in the U.S."



Along with this graph, Time has produced a substantial, informative article about crisis pregnancy centers, entitled 1 Woman at a Time.

A couple of quotes:

"Hers is the new face of an old movement: kind, calm, nonjudgmental, a special-forces soldier in the abortion wars who is fighting her battles one conscience at a time."

"Much of the antiabortion movement remains focused on changing laws, tightening restrictions one by one, state by state. But Wood and her team talk of changing hearts. They are part of a whole other strategy that is more personal and more pastoral, although to some people it's every bit as controversial."

There is also some good material about the need for pro-life groups to use accurate information and righteous means in seeking to accomplish their goals. Jeff Hutchinson, senior pastor Trinity Presbyterian Church (PCA), comes off very well in the article. Quote:

"I never would have said that the ends justify the means," he says. "But I know that was in my heart--if lying helps save a baby's life, that glorifies God." He has read some pregnancy-center brochures that he suspects are maybe shading the truth in the name of a larger good. "This whole process has reminded me that Jesus is not a Machiavellian," he says. "It really helps me trust the sovereignty of God. He's in control of who lives and dies. My effort is to serve folks, and the means I use matter. I have to glorify Jesus. The results are in God's hands."

Read the whole thing. And consider supporting organizations like CareNet and Heartbeat International.