ABORTIONISTS' LEAP IN LOGIC

By William F. Buckley, Jr.

Nothing frightens the choicers more than the thought of the

Supreme Court having another look at Roe vs. Wade, the decision by

which, back in 1973, the court eliminated state laws restricting the

right to abortion. The American Civil Liberties Union has been taking

out full-page ads urging readers to write letters to the attorney

general pleading with him not to engage the attention of the court to

the decision. Obviously such agitation would not be required if the

choicers were absolutely confident of the constitutional reasoning in

Roe vs. Wade.

If someone proposed to petition the court to outlaw free speech,

it isn't likely that much money could be raised to persuade the

attorney general please not to make the case before the court against

free speech. The fact of the matter is very plain, only we aren't

encouraged to say it" It is that Roe vs. Wade was a lousy decision,

perhaps even an indefensible act of constitutional excogitation, and

the choicers know that they are safest by not asking the court to look

again at this century's version of the Dred Scott decision.

Now, what the Supreme Court does in Roe vs. Wade will not, in the

judgment of serious folk, save a single doomed fetus. If Roe vs. Wade

were removed entirely from the books, returning to the states the right

to make their own laws, said states would almost without exception

continue to license abortion -- for the simple reason that the mod of

the people has changed since the days when they proscribed abortion.

The majority have talked themselves into believing that a woman has no

greater responsibility for the life of an unborn child than she has for

the life of a tomato. It won't be until there is a great change in

public sentiment that abortionists will gradually run out of clients.

But the arguments leveled against the lifers are nicely harnessed

by, of all people, Howard Fast, writing in the New York Observer. Fast

introduces only a single autobiographical line in his column. He says,

"I have been active in one part and another of the peace movement over

the past 40 years." In 1949, Howard Fast was defending Josef stalin.

Now to be sure, Fast repudiated Stalin when Nikita Khrushchev did, and

perhaps believes today that the Cold War is over, which one supposes

would make him a Reaganite.

But Fast is enraged by the lifers and uses an argument we hear

increasingly.

Here is how it goes: The lifers can't be sincere in their

concern for life. Why? Because their movement ends with the

birth of the child. They aren't there to oppose capital punishment,

AIDS, stomach cancer, or terrorism in Central America. "I have never

heard a right-to-life voice raised in protest against the 60,000

innocents murdered by the death squads of El Salvador."

This failed attempt at logic suggests that no cause can be

considered discretely. You cannot say, "Let's help the ailing farmer"

unless you also say "and the ailing zoo keeper and the ailing coal

miner" You can't organize to defend the freedom to travel without

simultaneously organizing to defend the freedom to die. Don't give to

the Red Cross because you haven't yet given to the Society for the

Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The lifers are, by Fast and others who think as he does,

encumbered by the responsibility for everything that happens to the

fetus after it materializes into a human being in the eyes of the law.

And if you aren't around to see to it that at age 14 the kid is

receiving the right education, ingesting the right foods, leading a

happy, prosperous life, why, you had no business bringing him into this

world. You are a hypocrite to the extent that you support life for

everyone who suffers in life.

It is only left for Fast to close the logic of this

own argument, which would involve him in a syllogistic

attempt along the lines of:

Everyone alive suffers.

No one not living suffers.

Therefore, no one should live.

In a free world, you can care greatly for baseball and not at all

for hockey. You can love the Rolling Stones and hate Bach and, while

you're at it, you can to hell. To decry the extermination of an unborn

chid doesn't require you to oppose hanging Adolf Eichmann.

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