Why aren’t there more people like this? And like the opposite number her existence implies? Th

Why aren’t there more people like this? And like the opposite number her existence implies? Think about it for two seconds and you’ll see that it makes more sense than the customary way the positions are arrayed. I made this point elaborately here, but I want to make it with concision now.

The pro-choice position: a swaggering and somewhat brutal amoralism (“It’s just a clump of cells!”), this amoralism’s sotto voce corollary that the poor should not reproduce very much, the absolute license the individual demands from the state’s ethical policing, the incredulous rejection of a new protected political class’s very existence—all very aristocratic, libertarian, Nietzschean, right-wing to the core. 

The pro-life position: a sentimental defense of the weak, an assertion of the state’s right to protect the minority, an attempt to enfranchise a new political subject, persnickety language policing and ugly neologisms (“pro-life” itself is a kind of PC coinage, and now they call the fetus “preborn,” even though the vernacular word “baby” would be more to their point), the activists’ widely-held conviction that they descend from the abolitionist movement—what could be more left-wing than this?

Even the institutional history up until the 1980s supports the way I’ve laid it out above, with the postwar Republican Party—the party of the WASP establishment—supporting “family planning” and the Democratic Party—with its New Deal workers’ alliance of northern urban Catholics and rural white southerners—being much more skeptical.

A memory, a parable. The year is 1990; I am eight years old; my mother is driving me to or from Catholic school, where I am learning that abortion is wrong. We pass a billboard, a political ad for the Pennsylvania governor’s race. The candidates are a female pro-choice Republican and a male pro-life Democrat (not just any pro-life Democrat either, but Bob Casey himself, of Planned Parenthood v. Casey fame). I ask my mother who she’s voting for. The Republican woman, she tells me. Abortion being among the most salient issues in the race, and my education having emphasized to me already that abortion was wrong, I gently propose that this may not quite be the moral choice. My mother counters that, while abortion may be wrong, or it may not, it is also inevitable, so better it remain safe and legal. 

Now this, however it may have lacked the moral sublimity of my religious education, seemed sensible, sober, realistic, conservative, all those things that “Republican” once connoted—and the very opposite of the radical moral sublime suggested in our own time, if you see what I mean, by “vegan activist she/her ACAB.”