The Journal editorialized on May 13th that the Republicans shouldn't get too worked up about Rudy Giuliani's pro-abortion position. After all (they say), it's divisive and is something for the courts anyway.
The Journal then published in full a letter by Professor Hadley Arkes taking an opposite opinion. The letter is re-printed in full, in First Things. The link will take you to the full letter; we have excerpted the last paragraph:
FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » The Friday Potpourri
Those are some of the things a president would be in a position to direct, quite modestly, without much exertion. You have taken the line for years that this matter of abortion cannot be the central issue in our politics. I’d simply offer this plea for a certain exercise of imagination: If some of us look out on the world, informed by the textbooks on embryology and obstetric gynecology, we think we have firm reason to know that these are nothing less than human lives that are destroyed in abortions. With a minor flexing of moral reasoning, we think that the justifications needed to take the lives of these small humans must be as compelling as the justifications that are needed to take other human lives. Anyone who looks out on the landscape with that lens sees 1.3 million lives taken in this country each year without the need to render a justification. Therefore, understanding that, where would you place this matter in the overall rank of our public business? Would it be just behind the question of interest rates or the level of taxes? Would you really be surprised that those of us who see things in this way cannot quite put this matter of the “life issues” at the periphery of our politics? Where then is the rigidity or the touch of fanaticism—on the part of those who see what is there, and seek moderate steps to address it, or on the part of those who somehow cannot acknowledge that real human beings are killed in these surgeries?
Hadley Arkes
Professor of Jurisprudence
Amherst College
Amherst, Mass.
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