Big
Conservatism, or the Big Con, having long ago fused with the GOP, embodies its
vision in the Republican Party platform. One of the planks of the latter
is the Big Con’s “pro-life” position on abortion.
Now, the most fundamental
reason for opposing abortion is that it consists in the killing of an innocent,
defenseless human being, a yet-to-be-born child. This being so, the
circumstances in which a child in the womb is conceived are about as morally
relevant to the fate of that child as are the circumstances surrounding the
conception of the reader of this essay morally relevant to determining his fate.
The circumstances of a human
being’s entrance into this world have utterly zero relevance
to whether he should live or die.
Yet
the merchants of the Big Con, for all of their rhetorical hosannas
(particularly during election season) to the sanctity of human life, have a
decidedly different track record.
Take the Big Con’s Patron
Saint, Ronald Reagan. The 40th POTUS
continues to be tirelessly depicted as pro-life. Yet Reagan opposed
abortion except for when he didn’t oppose it. In other words, he claimed
to oppose abortion in all instances except those of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is endangered.
Unsurprisingly, this tends to be the Big Con’s default position on
abortion. That it is at once a cop-out and inconsistent should be obvious
to anyone who slows down the three seconds necessary to see it for what it
is. It is the logical and moral equivalent of the view that the death
penalty is wrong—except for when it is administered to murderers, rapists, and
child sex predators, etc.
Obviously, anyone who holds
this view is not opposed to the death
penalty. Since the whole point of capital punishment
is to reserve its use only for those who are convicted of the most egregious of
offenses, anyone who favors its use in these “exceptional” cases is a proponent, not an opponent, of
it.
Similarly, the whole point of
opposing abortion is to protect innocent human
life. Thus, those who claim to be protectors of the most innocent and
defenseless among us while simultaneously relinquishing that protection due to
circumstances—like the violence in which conception occurred—that don’t in any
way undercut that innocence and defenselessness undermine the principle reason
for opposing abortion in the first place.
This,
though, was Reagan’s position.
Nor should this surprise
anyone when it is considered that as governor of California—several years
before Roe v. Wade, mind you—Reagan legalized abortion via the “Therapeutic Abortion
Act.” Courtesy of the Gipper’s move, approximately one million babies were killed in their mothers’
wombs.
Reagan would later blame this
ghastly phenomenon on…doctors, physicians who he
insisted misinterpreted the law that he signed. Yet even before the
legalized slaughtering got under way and after he had signed the bill into law,
Reagan remarked that had he been more experienced in the art of governing, he
would not have signed it.
Lou Cannon, a Reagan
biographer, said that Reagan did in fact come to regret his decision.
It’s not clear, though, exactly what it is about this decision that Reagan
regretted, for Cannon quickly added that Reagan “knew that the [previous]
California law [on abortion] was overly restrictive”
and “was particularly bothered that it made no exception for rape
or incest” (emphases added).
Furthermore,
for the eight years of his Presidency, Reagan proposed not a single piece of
pro-life legislation.
George
W. Bush, another two-term “conservative” Republican president who was widely
hailed as a champion of the unborn, was no more pro-life than Reagan. It’s true
that he signed a ban on so-called “partial-birth abortion,” as well as signing
the Born Alive Infants Protection Act and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act,
none of these actions made an iota’s worth of difference when it came to
preventing a single scheduled abortion.
But
matters were even worse than this.
For
starters, Bush continually insisted throughout his presidency that he does not
have a “litmus” test for nominating judges. In other words—follow the logic
here—although he ostensibly viewed abortion, the killing of a defenseless child
in the womb, as a great evil, Bush refused to hold it against judicial prospects
if they disagreed with him on this score.
Although
he supposedly regarded the act of destroying innocent human beings as unjust,
Bush had no moral or other objections to endowing judges with the authority and
power to rule in favor of those who would destroy these human beings.
If
you can’t see that this position is as intellectually incoherent as it is
morally contradictory, then there’s nothing more that can be said to you.
Second, Bush refused to lend support to South Dakota’s ban on
abortion in all instances except for when the mother’s life was endangered by
her pregnancy. As he told
ABCnews at the time: “Well…my position has always been three
exceptions: rape, incest and the life of the mother.”
The
South Dakota ban, in short, was too “restrictive” for Bush’s taste.
Now, while this view of
Bush’s is fatally problematic for the reasons already disclosed, it’s likely
deceptive by design. To put it
another way, that Bush—like Big Cons generally—is driven primarily by political
considerations, not moral conviction, is all but obvious given that South
Dakota legislators did wind
up adding his exceptions to
their legislation.
The
President, though, still refused to come out in support of their ban.
Jack
Kerwick [send
him mail] received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple
University. His area of specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He
is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey
and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com: At the Intersection of Faith
& Culture.
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