Month: October 2005

A reader asks:

If abortion is “always wrong,” more than that, “morally wrong,” then why make it legal for “pragmatic reasons?” Isn’t this a bit like the argument for torture? Everyone knows that torture is morally wrong, but some want to preserve the option, or give the appearance of preserving the option, for pragmatic reasons? The abortion question is difficult precisely because it is a pragmatic, but immoral, option.

There are a couple of responses to that. The first is that torture is now being committed by members of the government, not by private individuals. Authorizing or demanding that government-paid officials practice abortion is different than merely allowing citizens to perform the practice themselves in the private sphere. That’s why it’s possible to, say, support a policy that bars federally funded abortion, while allowing private individuals to do the same thing. What a government can do must meet a higher standard than the private choices of a private person – because the government represents all the people, not just a few. (That said, torture is just as illegal for private individuals as it is for government employees, so this particular analogy is moot. It would suggest that governments should have lower standards of moral conduct than its own citizens.) The second and stronger response is that the evil of abortion is committed within the confines of a human being’s own body. To deny that someone has a property interest in her own body is to deny the very basis of a liberal political order. It is to make the most fundamental liberty – the right to choose what we do with our own bodies – close to meaningless. Now, of course, it is argued that the fetus or unborn child is also a person. And so two property interests conflict. My pragmatic solution is to allow a woman the legal right to abort her child in the first trimester, where the fetus’s claim to personhood is weakest. That’s the situation in most countries allowed a democratic vote on the question. With torture, no such property interests conflict.

RAPE AND INCEST: Here’s a second email:

We now know that court nominee Harriet Miers backed an amendment in 1989 that sought to ban abortions except those to “prevent the death of the mother.” That precludes rape and incest, two situations that can lead to pregnancy. (It also dismisses other medical events in which pregnancy can severely tax the welfare of a sick woman.) So to answer your question about how someone could consider abortion moral, I’d ask you how you could consider abortion immoral in those situations. Asking someone to carry those fetuses to term against their will is a special private hell that no one should legally be forced to experience. I would argue that it is immoral and that such an event is a stone’s throw away if a Miers Court comes to fruition.

I’ve never understood the moral argument about banning all abortion as the taking of life, while allowing it in cases of rape and incest. I fully understand the psychological and simply humane reasons for allowing someone to abort in those cases. But if your argument is solely about human life, how it is created is irrelevant, compared to the fact that it is created. Miers’ position seems to me more coherent, if insensitive and cruel to a mother in such a circumstance. Equally, if your criterion is that abortion should be legal if it advances the mental health of the matter, I can see the point. But that’s such a nebulous standard it could be and is used to justify any abortion, including the horrifying later-term cases, which are intuitively very hard to distinguish from infanticide. Hence my unsatisfying political compromise for what is still, to my mind, a pretty clear moral issue. At the core of my compromise is an understanding that politics and morality are over-lapping but separate spheres. That distinction between law and morality is at the heart of the liberal project; and attacking it is at the heart of the theo-conservative and hard-left project. In that sense, I am a proud liberal.

The old war-horse of the Tory left has been eliminated from the race for the leadership of the British Conservative party. Now the fun begins, with a new and hopefully more vibrant generation.

“That’s what should make the spectacle of the past week so troubling to the Bush administration. It has depended on orthodoxy within the movement to suppress complaints. But now that discipline has broken down. The conservative movement increasingly resembles a dictator’s palace in the midst of a coup. Comrades have begun turning on one another with incredible fervor, as the widely ridiculed Bush apologist Hugh Hewitt will now surely attest. These days, you never know who will get dragged out and shot next. Since so many nagging complaints have festered for so long, it will surely get even uglier.” – Franklin Foer, at TNR, firewalled off from non-subscribers.

Bush continues to slide in every poll, with a post-Katrina acceleration downwards. Mystery Pollster examines the data.

Well, actually more than that. She would favor amending the federal constitution to ban all abortions, with the exception of the life of the mother. At least that was her position in 1989. That doesn’t mean that she’d vote for repeal of Roe, but it does help clarify things. For me, at least, a willingness to tamper with the Constitution itself to implement social policy is the opposite of any meaningful conservative philosophy. But, hey, that barn is already horse-free. Weirdly, I don’t think it will shore her up among the conservative establishment, who oppose her for her mediocrity, primarily. But it might generate enthusiasm from the religious base, and thereby galvanize the left, which, in turn, may solidify the right. I’m still a wait-and-see-er. The hearings are necessary. But it’s fascinating to see so many fissures on all sides developing.

Last night’s Colbert Report, of course. O’Reilly fileted. My only worry is: how can he keep it up?

“I just need to tell our story since you asked the question “how can abortion not always be wrong?”
My wife and I decided to try for our second baby on December 29, 2002. I happen to remember the date because it was our fifth wedding anniversary. We were amazingly fortunate the first time we wanted to have a baby, as she became pregnant in the second month of trying.
On January 24, 2003, she was diagnosed with lung cancer just three weeks after her 30th birthday. She went for a routine doctor visit and expected to be sent to an allergist because we had just moved into the middle of the East Texas pine forests. Instead, a chest x-ray led to this horrible diagnosis.
In the aftermath of the diagnosis, she did not menstruate. She was always very regular, and we didn’t think much about it until it became six days, then seven, then ten. On the eleventh day she did. To this day, I do not know whether she was pregnant and the stress of the situation caused her to miscarry, or whether the stress just threw off her cycle.
But for a week we sat in a limbo of not knowing, of not knowing what even to hope for. I don’t know what we would have decided to do, whether we would have postponed chemo and radiation long enough for her to have the baby or whether we would have had an abortion. She died on March 28, 2004, and as much as I would love to have another living monument to her life, I know I couldn’t have raised a newborn without her.
We were mere days from having to make a decision about abortion, and I don’t think we would have been wrong in any choice we would have made. I had always been pragmatically pro-choice, but that episode of my life just confirmed to me that just as we didn’t need someone else at our table helping us make this decision, I don’t want to be at someone else’s table either.
So I guess this is a long answer to how abortion can not always be wrong.”

The former general and secretary of state strongly backs the McCain Amendment banning abuse and torture of detainees:

KING: We’re back with General Powell, touching a few bases. We hope to have him on quite a bit to talk about a lot of his endeavors.

You publicly broke with the administration earlier this year, supporting Senate amendment 1977, the treatment of detainees. How is that coming along, by the way?

POWELL: Well, I wrote a letter supporting Senator McCain’s amendment. And the day the letter hit, the Senate voted on it and they passed that amendment 90-9. And I think that’s a pretty strong statement on the part of the Senate. And I hope the House responds accordingly.

All that amendment asks for is for American soldiers to follow the Army Field Manual. The field manual contains our doctrine and the way we’re supposed to behave. It’s our doctrine.

(CROSSTALK) POWELL: I have no idea why they would be against it, but the president is against it and the administration is against it because they think it will constrain them in some ways with respect to, I guess, interrogation of detainees.

But we have such a problem in this regard that I think it’s important that the Congress take a stand on this. Congress, under the Constitution, Article I, Section 8, is the body that makes laws and regulations governing the armed forces. They’re not telling the administration what to put in this field manual.

They’re saying, if it’s a field manual and it’s guidance to the troops, what’s wrong with the United States Congress also endorsing that? And so I hope that the amendment does pass either in the defense authorization or the appropriation bill.

Did you hear that, Senators Allard and Inhofe?

“Earlier this year, I received notice that my dues for the District of Columbia Bar were delinquent and as a result my ability to practice law in D.C. had been suspended. I immediately sent the dues in to remedy the delinquency. The nonpayment was not intentioned, and I corrected the situation upon receiving the letter.” – Harriet Miers. Ryan Lizza removes the “details-oriented” qualification from the list.

I cannot say I’m surprised. Bruce Bartlett is an actual fiscal conservative. He has principles. His loyalty is to his ideas, not to the conservative intelligentsia’s think-tank welfare-state. If I were him, I’d be delighted to be fired for dissent. It’s good publicity for his book; and a sign of his integrity. Memo to Bruce: get a blog. The pressure for herd mentality is less intense when you’re in pajamas in the home office; and you don’t have to hide your contempt for the sell-outs and suck-ups who walk by your office every day.

REYNOLDS NAILS IT: I think Instapundit gets to the core of the Miers problem here:

Despite charges of cronyism, Ms. Miers is not simply the president’s crony, but his lawyer — formerly his personal attorney, and now his presidential attorney. This has already given rise to paranoid theories from the left to the effect that Mr. Bush is trying to protect himself from prosecution growing out of the Plame affair or the Iraq war. These theories are unlikely, not least because Ms. Miers’s current position would probably disqualify her from hearing precisely those kinds of cases. And even if she were not disqualified, there might be doubts about her objectivity that would undermine the court’s reputation.

What if Clinton had appointed David Boies to the court? More to the point: I’m not sure the worries from the paranoid left are entirely misplaced. From all I hear, Miers was hardly unaware of the decision to torture detainees and certainly knows a huge amount about the decision by the White House to upend decades of clarity on the matter. Putting her on the court is one way of keeping her – and what she knows – beyond public scrutiny.