Party of Death, Meet Party of Ideological Inconsistencies

'The Party of Death,' by Ramesh Ponnuru - Jonathan Rauch

I'd look forward to treating Ponnuru's truly puerile book with any degree of seriousness more than Ann Coulter deserves, but this caught my attention ...

Ponnuru is capable of razor-edged moral acuity, and of a searching seriousness that many of his adversaries could learn from. “But of course the embryo looks exactly like a human being,” he writes in a knifelike sentence that pulled me up short: “It looks like a human being in the embryonic stage of development.” All the more disappointing, then, that even as he mercilessly exposes the implications of his adversaries’ position, he flinches from the implications of his own.

“Eight-week-old fetuses do not differ from 10-day-old babies in any way that would justify killing the former,” he writes. “The law will either treat the fetus as a human being with a right to be protected from unjust killing or it will not.” If those are the only choices, and if the right position is that an early-term fetus is a full-fledged person, why not impose jail terms on women who seek abortions? After all, they are taking out a contract for murder. Instead of confronting that question, Ponnuru equivocates, mumbling that “the pro-life movement” does not necessarily seek jail time for women and that fining doctors and revoking medical licenses might suffice.

He believes that discarding or destroying embryos should be forbidden, but should it be punishable as first-degree murder? If not, why not?

Therein lies the inconsistency that does in the rightwing anti-abortion sentiment. Alas, Ponnuru merely puts a nice intellectual surrounding around the 'bleeding edge,' far right's own vacuous argument - that of the Tom Coburn/Dan Patrick wing of the party. Their 'cure' is to hold the doctor accountable instead of the woman. Well, then that means abortion isn't murder. It's a curious journey down that dark, vacuous intellectual path.

I make that argument as a pro-life progressive, of course. Looking at it from my own perspective, it really comes down to answering a very simple question: "How do you get people to do something you believe to be best and right ?" Ironic that, for our GOP friends, the answer is a Big Government solution. I'm more inclined to incentivize a solution and leave the decision in the hands of the people affected. The 95-10 bill that's been making the rounds on Capitol Hill is a good start, of course. I'm still not convinced that connecting community service to the act of abortion isn't a bad political idea, but I'll leave a more serious trial ballooning of the idea to anyone more diplomatic than myself.

Intellectually, our Republican friends lose themselves when they attach the penalty to someone who would be just as happy prescribing sugar pills to kids than wading through protesters who may well have an urge to kill them on their way to work (strange that the acquiescent silence on this matter by Ponnuru doesn't qualify his own cred in the Party of Death!). Attach the penalty to the actor (or the dad ... Heaven forbid!) and you've at least come closer to bridging that final 5% of abortions that will be the most difficult to erase from consideration.

But, again, we come back to that simple question ... how to make someone do something. It's simple, really. Make something else a more attractive option. Tough to do for major, life-altering decisions, though. Being required to do community service for having an abortion isn't going to please the Randall Terry wing of the GOP, of course. But I guess it's time for them to really look in the mirror and ask themselves if they're content being paired with people like him for much longer.