By
Tom McDermott
Did you ever wonder what life might be like if your core values were different? I found myself wondering that as I attended the pro-life counter-demonstration at Tuesday's abortion rights rally. Maybe if my parents, my teachers and, yes, the Catholic Church had not instilled in me a profound respect for the sanctity of human life, I might be on the other side.
Maybe I wouldn't be carrying a sign with some radical feminist slogan - one of the cuter ones Tuesday read "Bush, stay out of my bush" - but things might be a little bit easier for me if I were to compromise my views on life. I have many conservative friends, some even more to the right than I am, who are ardently pro-choice. And becoming a pro-choice Republican might be very beneficial to future political aspirations, especially if I moved back East.
Abortion rights advocates often ask, "Why are you conservatives always complaining about government involvement in our personal lives, and yet you want to take away our right to choose?" Admittedly, a lot of pro-life people have difficulty with this challenge, but the answer really couldn't be simpler.
It is because abortion is so repugnant to the very concept of a civilized society that the so-called "right" to engage in it should never have been recognized by the courts. While we believe strongly in limited government, that the state would ensure protection for the practice of killing children inside and sometimes outside the womb is a direct assault on our humanity. Furthermore, it is not something the framers could have or would have ever intended the Constitution to protect.
At the very least, the choice of whether abortion is something the people can tolerate should have been left to the people - as represented by the legislatures of the several states. In fact, if Roe vs. Wade was overturned today, abortion would remain legal in many states.
Roe and its predecessor, Griswold vs. Connecticut, were poorly decided. In those cases, the court stretched the Constitution to find an independent right of privacy. Although the protections afforded by the First, Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments undoubtedly have interrelated aspects of privacy, the court drastically departed from its long history of judicial restraint and its reverence for the Ninth and Tenth Amendments in declaring that the framers intended a right of privacy to stand on its own. In his dissent of Roe, Justice White called the decision "an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review."
Another thing that annoyed me about the rally was the constant characterization of all pro-life conservatives as zealous moralists who believe that no reasonable person could ever disagree. This is an insidious lie - which, unfortunately - the other side has been successful in spreading. Deep commitment to protecting children is too often misconstrued, and misrepresented, as intolerance.
Look at the number of pro-choice Republicans in the Bush administration: the secretary of state, the chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, even the first lady. Compare that to the repulsive excommunication of the late Gov. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania by the Democratic Party.
Casey dedicated his life to serving the principles of his party, and he was a truly great governor. But because he took a public pro-life stand, he was an outcast. From the day his speech at the 1992 Democratic Convention was canceled, he was persona non grata. The party did every thing in its power to ensure that a pro-life leader would never rise to national prominence within its ranks.
Here was a popular governor - undoubtedly on the rise before health problems set in - who would have attracted recalcitrant Reagan Democrats back to the party while picking up boatloads of Republicans. But apparently, the Democrats just didn't want that kind around.
So who's really towing the party-line on abortion? The so-called right wing zealots in the Bush administration? Or the ever tolerant and respectful Democrats on the other side of the aisle?
