Life's Recovery
Ponnuru, Ramesh
BOOKS IN REVIEW ing rhythm, like a ripe pear tree yielding to an insistent wind. Only a pithy classical sentence could break the spell, a polished maxim by someone who understood the rigorous...
...These regulations, along with ultrasound machines and crisis pregnancy centers-whose selfless volunteers don't get enough attention in The Party ofDeatb-have helped reduce the abortion rate from its early '90s high...
...the abstract right to life over the palpable suffering of illness and disability...
...On this issue, the prolife case is theoretically stronger because there is no conflict with the mother's right to control her own body...
...Yet The Party of Death succeeds in showingwithout equivocation, but also without the overheated rhetoric that distorts many pro-life polemics--where the abortion mentality can lead and challenging pro-lifers to pursue real but gradual change...
...Roe v. Wade did not, as is often claimed, merely legalize abortion in the first trimester...
...the embryo they can't see rather than the sick and elderly relative they love...
...More than 90 percent of pre-1973 illegal abortions were performed by licensed physicians, not coat hangers...
...Ponnuru shows that concern for the unborn far predates the modern pro-life movement and did motivate legislators to proscribe abortion...
...T HE DEHUMANIZATION OF THE FETUS also paved the way for scientific experiments that destroy human embryos...
...In some circles, it is now expected that mothers will undergo prenatal testing and simply abort their children if the tests show they may be disabled...
...After all, who wants to defend "discarded" or "surplus" embryos--which don't look much like babies-against miracle cures for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and a host of other ailments...
...And prochoice advocates are working, with some success, to shift the abortion debate away from late-term procedures, where their position is unpopular andperhaps untenable, to earlier in the pregnancy, where majorities are still behind them...
...While they can point to electoral gains and some progress at making the law slightly more protective of unborn children, embryonic stem-cell research and growing public acceptance of euthanasia have caught the movement fiat-footed...
...How do you like them unsprayed, unwaxed apples...
...Yet somehow 1994 didn't alter the consensus that opposing abortion was a losing issue, even though no pro-life incumbent of either partylost that year to a pro-choice challenger...
...Former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders is quoted pointing out how successful abortion had been at reducing the number of "Down's syndrome infants" in Washington state...
...In a study published in the spring 2001 issue of the Public Interest, Stuart Rothman and Amy Black found that 97 percent of elite journalists believed in a "right" to abortion...
...Take to the hills, he advises, except that he classes it up with the story of St...
...And most of the standards employed to establish that the fetus isn't a person apply with equal force to newborns...
...Orrin Hatch (R-UT) comes to mind-have reconciled their position with support for federally funded embryo-destructive research...
...No wonder some detractors are so adamant that it doesn't deserve to be read...
...He has decided that Jimmy Carter got it right in his famous "Malaise speech" and regrets that ignorance and ideology blinded him to it for so long...
...Each reader Ponnuru reaches will be an important addition to a noble civil-rights cause...
...Since Casey, dozens of states have enacted parental-notification requirements, mandatory pre-abortion counseling, and other mild restrictions...
...it has swept from the maternity ward to the cloning laboratory to a generalized disregard for 'inconvenient' human life ." This "party of death" isn't (just) the Democrats, but a broad group of intellectuals and advocates who "explicitly deny that all human beings are equal in having a right to life and who propose the creation of a category of'human nonpersons' who can be treated as expendable...
...Only a pithy classical sentence could break the spell, a polished maxim by someone who understood the rigorous use of language, i.e., someone Dreher does not know personally...
...Benedict, who in the late Roman Empire urged citizens of collapsing Roman cities to leave and establish monasteries in the countryside...
...Pro-lifers face new challenges on the biotechnology front...
...D ESPITE THE VERBAL ECSTASY squirting out of him like ink from a squid, cheerfulness is not Dreher's long suit...
...they insisted that the fetus was a blob of tissue, subhuman--or at least sub-person-and devoid of rights...
...This is unfortunate, as Ponnuru's work demands a literate pro-choice response...
...Years ago, Republicans suicidally carried on :The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life by Ramesh Ponnuru (REGNERY, 320 PAGES, $27.95) Reviewed by W. James Antle III against the New Deal long after it had been accepted by most citizens as part of the fabric of American political life," the columnist Charles Krauthammer averred...
...Ponnuru-in agreement with many media critics--contends that this pro-choice bent shows up in biased coverage of abortion, euthanasia, and stem-cell research...
...Partial-birth abortion" appears with the qualification that this is a pro-life phrase rejected by the other side, but a ban on federally funded abortion counseling may be described as a"gag rule" and the enactment of pro-life legislation is often depicted as a "setback for abortion rights...
...Only one such sentence is to be found in the entire book, when, miraculously, he quotes St...
...How...
...The arguments Peter Singer makes for infanticide-an issue to which Ponnuru devotes a chapter-bear an uncomfortable resemblance to those justifying abortion...
...Despite the best efforts of pro-choice opinionmakers, however, public attitudes on abortion have shifted in a pro-life direction...
...In The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life, this prescient debunker of myths that After all, who wants to defend "discarded" or "surplus" embryos-which don't look much like babies-against miracle cures for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and a host of other ailments...
...Wade, the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency, and the "Year of the Woman" that swept several outspokenly pro-choice Democratic women into the Senate-were widely seen as signals that abortion opponents were no longer an effective political force...
...Justice Harry Blackmun maintained that abortion was not prohibited under common law, but in fact it was...
...Antibiotics played a larger role in reducing maternal abortion deaths than did Roe...
...Making people feel guilty is the liberal's specialty, and it sounds as if he's turning into one...
...Abortion politics have undergone quite a transformation since 1992...
...shroud abortion politics undertakes a comprehensive defense of the sanctity-of-life ethic...
...This bias can be discerned in the terminology favored by newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times...
...Anyone who takes up this challenge must do battle against a vast media-fed cultural tide that presents them as enemies of science, progress, Superman, and Ronald Reagan...
...JULY/AUGUST 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75 BOOKS IN REVIEW saved themselves some post-election angst by reading Ramesh Ponnuru, whose journalism in National Review and elsewhere cast considerable doubt on pro-choice invincibility long before the conventional wisdom changed...
...Ponnuru calmly and persuasively rebuts this tendentious framing of the issue and points out that it is the promoters of embryonic stem-cell research who are often "faith-based" and irrational...
...Except that many of the criteria used to prove the non-personhood of the fetus, including sentience and the ability to live independently, deny personhood to a surprising number of human beings living outside the womb...
...Drawing on research that dates back to his days 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW as an undergraduate at Princeton, Ponnuru makes a strong case that Roe relied on a shoddy and often erroneous reading of history...
...It wasn't good enough for prochoice activists to argue that legal abortion was preferable to women endangering their lives in the back alley...
...Pro-lifers are asking people to side with the unseen fetus rather than the pregnant woman they know...
...Life's Recovery I N 1992, THE PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT was pronounced dead...
...In between affirming 'n' connecting to a richer 'n' fuller meetedness, he takes obvious pleasure in describing in lurid detail the slaughtering techniques at agribusiness holding pens...
...After spending an entire book condemning heartless modern innovations that zap us with so much alienation and unconnectedness that we can't tell life's aching wonders from a hole in the ground, he now wants to build his brave new world on the device that keeps more people glued to more screens for more hours than television ever did...
...But," he writes, "the fact the media consistently make the same choice.., is revealing...
...A majority on the Court believed that anti-abortion laws were mostly based on factors other than a desire to protect fetal life...
...Instead many abortion opponents-Sen...
...Don't get me wrong," he hastens to add...
...Ponnuru makes note of Elders's phraseology, saying, "We wouldn't call someone a'breast cancer' woman...
...Democratic consultants could have W. James Antic III is a senior writer for the American Conservative...
...It would be so easy to do nowadays, Dreher rhapsodizes, because of--the Internet...
...The historical record might have been corrected earlier had Roe faced a more skeptical media...
...The party of death started with abortion," Ponnuru begins, "but its sickle has gone from threatening the unborn, to the elderly, to the disabled...
...Obituaries for the rightto-life cause often contained warnings for the Republican Party...
...The brave new world of uncontested pro-choice rule lasted exactly two years, until the Republicans took control of Congress and both houses had pro-life leadership...
...Thanks to broadband, everybody can now work at home, making it possible for crunchy cons to form virtual monastic communities...
...Ponnuru may have identified a party of death without understanding its attraction to normal, well-meaning people...
...The GOP had a choice between becoming pro-choice and preparing to lose more elections...
...I f rigorous logic is this book's main strength, its biggest weakness is an excessive reliance on logic to overcome strong emotional appeals...
...They have seized on the provocative title-along with the publisher's efforts to market to conservatives-to dismiss the book as a hyperbolic partisan tract unworthy of attention...
...And pro-lifers need the intellectual reinforcement...
...He sometimes seems to suspect it himself, and falls into the trap of protesting too much...
...Over the next few election cycles, pro-lifers gained dozens of congressional seats, a few governorships, and eventually the presidency, but it wasn't until John Kerry's failed presidential bid ten years later that political strategists began to question whether abortion might in fact be a losing i s s u e - f o r Democrats...
...Of course, some critics don't want to pay attention this time either...
...B UT AS THE BACKLASH o v e r Terri Schiavo r e - v e a l e d , similar progress has not been evident in the euthanasia debate...
...Several factors--the Supreme Courts Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision reaffirming Boev...
...Anti-abortion legislation could just as easily be described as "restrictive" or "protective," for example, depending on your point of view...
...Thomas Aquinas: "Wine may lawfully be drunk utque ad hilaritatem" (to the point of cheerfulness...
...he's grateful to Reagan for restoring optimism and confidence, but now we need to change the culture to "reclaim a way of life that's--[sway alert]--richer, more satisfying, more grounded, more sustainable, more meaningful and, in the end, more authentically joyful...
...Meaningful abortion restrictions are impossible through all nine months of pregnancy...
...Ponnuru acknowledges the difficulty of covering life issues neutrally...
...Republicans had better not do the same with legal abortionY A writer for the Boston Globe Magazine summed up the lesson of'92 more bluntly: voting women "don't want to be told they can't have an abortion...
...The older pro-abortion shibboleths receive the same treatment, as Ponnuru demolishes them one by one...
...JULY/AUGUST 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77...
Vol. 39 • July 2006 • No. 6
