The Culture Beat

A recent opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal‘s online site argues that there’s room for compromise in setting abortion policy. Hoover Institute Fellow Peter Berkowitz, in critiquing National Review writer Ramesh Ponnuru’s book, The Party of Death, says that Ponnuru is asking too much by insisting that, because abortion is murder, from the moment of conception to birth, there is a developing human child that must be protected, no exceptions.

But Berkowitz lost me when I came to this paragraph:

At the core of “The Party of Death” is the argument that an embryo has the same claim on us as a newborn child because, from the moment of conception, it contains the genetic structure of a unique human being. It doesn’t matter to Mr. Ponnuru that this argument flies in the face of a complex intuition that seems to underlie the American ambivalence: Invisible to the naked eye, lacking body or brain, feeling neither pleasure nor pain, radically dependent for life support, the early embryo, though surely part of the human family, is distant and different enough from a flesh-and-blood newborn that when the early embryo’s life comes into conflict with other precious human goods or claims, the embryo’s life may need to give way. Deciding just which goods and claims are compelling is, of course, agonizingly difficult but does not, in itself, place one beyond the pale.

Either one believes that life begins at conception and thus, destroying that life is simply wrong and not open to compromise, or I suppose you must believe that at a certain point, the status of a life worthy of protection emerges during the nine-month period (although, with the defence of partial-birth abortion, even a child viable outside of the womb can be killed, so the courts have even upheld that atrocity). Berkowitz doesn’t specify what “other precious human goods or claims” trump the life of the child and I fear that leaving this so vague puts us back in a de facto system of abortion upon deman. The nature of life and death are inherently absolute and thus I find it difficult to entertain or even understand Berkowitz’ notions of compromise on this issue.