Hadley Arkes, Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College, chastises the Wall Street Journal for adopting the cavalier line of Rudy Giuliani regarding abortion. Arkes spells out the responsibility that the United States legislative bodies bear in relation to abortion and then offers this unassailable conclusion (my emphases):
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?
Update: 5/19/07 - I provided a link (above) to the Wall Street Journal article and see that I should have provided more of Hadley Arkes' article since the WSJ suggests the abortion issue rests largely with the courts. On the contrary, as Arkes points out:
If there is a constitutional right, the legislative and executive branches must have the authority to vindicate that right, and in enforcing it, give it scale and proportion.
President Bush and other Republicans have been content to promise that they will appoint to the courts lawyers like
John Roberts and Sam Alito. The unspoken promise is that these judges, one day, will overrule Roe v. Wade. And on the day that happens, what will those Republican politicians do? They have now talked themselves out of the notion that the political branches have any responsibility here. My guess is that most of the Republicans don’t have the slightest sense of what they would do on the day Roe ends. And yet, it doesn’t follow, as you suggest, that the matter simply returns to the states, as though the president and Congress had little reason to deal with this matter.
Consider just a few of the things that fall to the president and Congress: There is the obvious matter of the practice of abortion in the diplomatic and military outposts abroad, and in the District of Columbia. There is the question of whether the National Institutes of Health should make use of tissues drawn from fetuses in elective, not spontaneous, abortions. We have a dramatic case right now, in New Jersey, of a hospital that has arguably violated the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act, the act that casts the protection of the law on children who survive abortions. But that case is languishing in the Justice Department, with a White House paying no attention. Would a President Giuliani take more interest in faithfully executing the laws we have passed? Using the old Bob Jones case, another administration may seek to withdraw tax exemptions from hospitals and clinics that violate the Born-Alive Act. That would be a momentous move, emanating from the center of our politics—as would be the move to withdraw all federal funding from hospitals and clinics that house the partial-birth abortion. We are not likely to see criminal cases brought under the act, recently sustained, that forbids that grisly procedure. But the threat to remove federal funds could move us to the endgame on the performance of many kinds of abortions in hospitals and clinics.
Those are some of the things a president would be in a position to direct, quite modestly, without much exertion. [Then follows the quotation I included in my original post]