Update 11/5/07 - Ramesh Ponnuru has an essay on the critical reaction to his book, The Party of Death, in the new Human Life Review.
Update 12/04/06 - Wilfred M. McClay, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, offers a comprehensive, thoughtful review of Ponnuru's book in the Fall, 2006 New Atlantis. Any evaluation of Ponnuru's book will profit greatly from consulting this extensive review. (HT: Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner)
Update: Wesley J. Smith offers a significant review in the July 3, 2006 issue of the Weekly Standard.
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Ramesh Ponnuru has published a new book, The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life It's getting lots of reviews. His colleague, Kate O'Beirne, no slouch herself and author of Women Who Make the World Worse, says of it:
Ramesh's remarkable new book is the occasion for a big celebratory one. Now everyone can have the benefit of what I have repeatedly relied on when I ask "Ramesh, what are your quick thoughts on [insert whatever topic I am expected to have insightful views about]." Over the years, his thoughtful, incisive answers have made me look smarter on everything from taxes and trade to amnesty and abortion. Although I have debated the issue of abortion for decades, I now can't imagine how I did so persuasively without a copy of The Party of Death. It's a beautifully written and powerfully argued expose of the culture of death. Ramesh's reporting reveals facts about abortion and life issues that I was unaware of. (The tiff over the deliberately provocative title is telling. It provides an excuse for failing to confront the book's devastating contents). For busy well-informed people, The Party of Death is the rarest of books - a must-read.
Mark Steyn embeds some commentary in the midst of a larger article saying:
The Party Of Death is a very tightly argued case: by halfway through, Ponnuru had made me realize he was pro-life for much better reasons than I am. Yet the book isn't about abortion per se, so much as "the politics of personhood." One consequence of abortion is that, in designating new life a matter of "choice," it made it easier to make judgments about which lives are worth it and which aren't. Down's syndrome? Abort. Cleft palate? Abort. Chinese girl? Abort. But it's foolish to think you can raise entire populations -- not to mention generations of doctors -- to make self-interested judgments about who lives and who doesn't and expect them to remain confined to three trimesters. The "right to choose" is now being extended beyond the womb: the step from convenience conception to convenience euthanasia is a short one, and the step from convenience euthanasia to compulsory euthanasia shorter still.
Commentators like Andrew Sullivan have attacked Ponnuru, somewhat hysterically, not for his book's argument but for its title. In fact, the author got it from Ronald Dworkin, a liberal legal theorist, pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia, but nevertheless intellectually honest enough to admit that these are "choices for death." They lead not just to literal death but to a societal and spiritual death, too. In The Cube and the Cathedral, George Weigel begins his lively dissection of "politics without God" with a bracing series of questions, including the following:
"Why do certain parts of Europe exhibit a curious, even bizarre, approach to death? Why did so many of the French prefer to continue their summer vacations during the European heat wave of 2003, leaving their parents unburied and warehoused in refrigerated lockers (which were soon overflowing)? Why is death increasingly anonymous in Germany, with no death notice in the newspapers, no church funeral ceremony, no secular memorial service -- 'as though,' Richard John Neuhaus observed, 'the deceased did not exist'?"
Update: Wesley J. Smith offers a significant review in the July 3, 2006 issue of the Weekly Standard.