Duthie On...

John Stossel’s got a new book out called Give Me a Break that looks pretty promising as an antidote to the pervasive Nanny State, or at least as a sound argument against same. Given the new book, Stossel is making the rounds of radio, etc., and I happened to catch him on the Laura Ingraham show this morning. As I understand it, Stossel’s political leanings can best be described as libertarian, and since I’m a libertarian-leaning conservative, I don’t think there’s much that I’d disagree with Stossel on. But I was appalled by a statement he made on the subject of abortion. When asked his opinion on the matter, he first stated quite clearly that he believes that life begins at conception. So far, so good. I share that belief. But Stossel then went on to say that he believes that it is acceptable for a person to dispose of a life growing within them (I’m paraphrasing, as I don’t have the exact quote). He also said that he’d probably make the cutoff point for legal abortion the first trimester, saying that we had to “find a compromise” on the issue.

It probably won’t surprise regular readers that I find such a view utterly appalling, from both a conservative and a libertarian point of view. From a social conservative point of view, taking an innocent life is morally wrong, regardless of when the procedure is performed. From a libertarian point of view, if you acknowledge (as Stossel does) that life begins at conception, then one can presume that the individual being formed in the womb has rights, rights that neither another individual (the mother or others), nor the state may justly deprive that individual of. To say, as Stossel does, that we should just choose some arbitrary point in gestation to outlaw the killing of the unborn strikes me as a cop-out of massive proportions that allows him to avoid the sticky moral and ethical issues involved.

The right to life is one of the most basic that we recognize, and it’s one that almost everyone agrees the government has an interest in protecting. Unfortunately, there are still those who believe that while children who have made it out of the womb, adults, and even convicted murderers are worthy of having their lives protected, the unborn do not merit our protection. This saddens me, and I think it says something rather terrible about us as a society that even a law banning something as barbaric as partial-birth abortion is being fought in the courts because abortion supporters will brook no law that interferes with the “right” to terminate the life of the unborn. It is a measure of how devalued life has become in this country that it was necessary to pass a law to protect the life of an infant who was born alive despite an attempt at abortion.

Abortion supporters claim that conservatives want to take away their rights. I believe they’re wrong. They’re wrong because what conservatives want is to protect rights…in this case the rights of the unborn. They’re wrong because they think that abortion is a simple matter of choice. Well, I think that choice can also be exercised before conception. And yes, I’m certainly aware that there are cases such as rape or incest where the woman can’t exercise a choice about having sex. But I’m not the one who has chosen to frame this issue as “protecting a woman’s right to choose”. As I pointed out in an earlier post, that “choice” has been exercised more than 40 million times since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion across this country. That doesn’t sound like a culture of choice to me, it sounds like a culture of death. And Stossel, like many others, for all his recognition of the harm that government can do, is content to let it go on.