On the Right - Needed from W.: A Fireside Chat - Brief Article - Editorial

NEW YORK, JULY 18

T he life/choice business really is unique, as witness its distinctive hold on the vice-presidential GOP choice. There are two schools of thought. The one says that George Bush's candidacy becomes incoherent on the matter of life if he picks as his vice president someone who is pro-choice. The other school says that to select a running mate who is for choice acknowledges the division of sentiment among the voters, and in so doing reinforces the eclectic appeal of the candidate. Moreover, it gives off to the critical public the spice of independence, and some people like that and would be attracted to such a man.

There is a point here that needs to be made in an effort (almost certainly vain) to explain in a sentence the moral intensity of the question before the house. Those who believe in abortion rights believe in the right of a woman to extinguish fetal life. Now a belief in that right can be offhanded, and it can be ardent. But in all such cases the right being upheld is in the nature of an accommodation to the mother. She doesn't want a child, so get rid of the fetus. The life people are saying that to get rid of the fetus is a pre-infanticidal act.

Now how do we know whether the life people are "correct"? The answer is that we won't "know" until there is something in the nature of a final historical moral resolution on the question, to be compared with the contemporary creeping resolution that slavery was not just distasteful, but absolutely intolerable. To come to that conclusion took about 30 centuries. The need for understanding in a pluralist society has to do not with whether abortion is a capital wrong, but with the question of how are people who do believe exactly that to coexist with those whose concern is entirely with what they take to be absolute rights of the mother.

The question arises: Are there reasons to suspect that the Catholic politician who believes in choice is taking that position because there is "internal dissent" from the teaching of the Church-or is he temporizing? The Catholic politician who is in favor of choice is hardly a phenomenon in the world of Kennedy, Cuomo, and Moynihan. What the public needs to be reassured about is that accepted political processes aren't going to be violated by a president. Assuming that life were the preeminent concern of President George W. Bush, what would he do about it? He can do pretty much what he wishes, if the Pentagon is his instrument. But he has no power to get in the way of the abortionist. Only the Supreme Court can do that, and Mr. Bush could go no further than to nominate to that Court men or women whose readings of the separation of powers were the same as his own.

Gov. Bush would do everyone a favor if he were to say, even ahead of his actually naming a running mate, that there is no way a Bush administration could get in the way of those who elect abortion, and no way he would consent to do so assuming he had that power. The call for a constitutional amendment in the GOP platform is a platonic will-o'-the-wisp, as meaningful as our coinage's declaration that "In God We Trust." It should be possible to assess the desirability of Gov. Tom Ridge as a vice presidential candidate without reference to his position on abortion, and it would be good to hear exactly that from George W. Bush-even if he did not proceed to designate him.

Gov. Bush is unlikely to fashion definitive moral sensibilities on the matter of abortion, but he could do a lot to engender an understanding of the requirements of a pluralist society. It may be that his advisers are telling him to ease away from critical issues, to satisfy himself with philosophical pleasantries on such matters as immigration and bilingual education and school vouchers; but no question is more polarizing than the division over abortion, and here, especially in the context of his upcoming decision on a running mate, he might significantly instruct the public, as Lincoln so amply did in his pre-presidential life.

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