Harder Hearts on Abortion
And Michelman said, "It's not only a myth, it's a lie" that partial birth abortions are used to eliminate fetuses for minor defects such as cleft palates. But abortion practitioner Dr. James McMahon already had told Congress he had personally performed nine of these procedures solely because of cleft palates. Compared with the abortion-rights lobby, the O.J. defense looks obsessively ethical and tightly focused on verifiable truth.
In an article last month in the New Republic, feminist Naomi Wolf, an abortion-rights advocate, wrote that "with the pro-choice rhetoric we use now, we incur three destructive consequences ... hardness of heart, lying and political failure." She wrote: "By refusing to look at abortion within a moral framework, we lose the millions of Americans who want to support abortion as a legal right but still need to condemn it as a moral iniquity."
The partial birth issue is a good time for abortion-rights supporters to reclaim the moral framework that Wolf says they have relinquished. This repellent procedure goes way too far. No other Western nation, to my knowledge, allows it. It was unanimously condemned by the American Medical Association's council on legislation. (The full association later decided to duck the issue and take no position.)
Those who defend it reflexively because it may lead to other legislation are in the exact position of gun lobbyists who shoot down bans on assault weapons because those bans may one day lead to a roundup of everybody's handguns. They refuse, on tactical grounds, to confront the moral issue involved. More of the abstract hardness that Wolf writes about.
Killing a five-month or six-month fetus that's halfway down the birth canal raises a moral issue way beyond that of ordinary abortion. It's perfectly possible to support a woman's right to abort and still think that the anything-goes ethic of this horrific procedure has no place in a culture with any reverence left for life.
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