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“Baby” or “Fetus”?(Reprinted
from the issue of June 12, 2003)
 The grisly murder of Laci Peterson and her unborn
child has shocked many people into new reflections on abortion. It
has also put the pro-abortion forces on the defensive. Clearly the child,
as well as his mother, was the victim of an undeniably monstrous crime.
 Seeing the implications, the feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, an
aggressive harpy if there ever was one, objects to the news media’s use of
the word “child” in coverage of the story. She insists that “fetus” is
“the correct medical term.” Of course she is doing what the pro-abortion
movement always does: insisting on technical language in order to
dehumanize the unborn.
But “child” is no
more “incorrect” than “mother” is. There is no reason to prefer the
abstract medical term to the normal and natural word, with all its moral
overtones. No doubt Miss Allred would rather say the child was
“terminated” than that he was “murdered.”
I never cease to
marvel at the semantic perversions of abortion advocates. As they
trivialize the aborted child as a “fetus,” they actually try to humanize
the professional killer of unborn children as an “abortion provider,”
rather than an “abortionist.” A strange distribution of sympathies, but
that’s what happens when you try to normalize murder.
Like
Milton’s Satan, the abortion advocates are really saying: “Evil, be thou
my good.” In the end, as C.S. Lewis reminds us, when you choose evil you
are also choosing nonsense.
A Summons to Conservatives
Donald Devine, vice chairman of the American
Conservative Union, has recently offered a sharp, though typically civil,
challenge to the conservative movement. He laments that the movement has
lost its way, and is in danger of being reduced to “cheerleading for the
White House.”
As Devine sees it,
conservatives have allowed themselves to be seduced by distractions of
“empire” and “national greatness,” which are in tension with, if not
inimical to, their core principles of limited and constitutional
government. As a result, true conservatism — the kind that brought Barry
Goldwater and Ronald Reagan to national prominence — is no longer a real
force in American politics.
Devine has always
been one to keep his eye on the ball, combining philosophy with political
savvy. I first met him 30 years ago, when he gave a brilliant, stirring
speech at a meeting of the Philadelphia Society. He drew on the thought of
one of my intellectual heroes, Willmoore Kendall, but without Kendall’s
rather cavalier scorn for the Tenth Amendment, the cornerstone of
constitutional limitations on the federal government. Devine was emphatic
about confining the government to the (few) powers assigned to it.
That kind of conservatism is hardly heard from these days. It has
been upstaged and crowded out of the public square by neoconservatism,
which is unconcerned with constitutional limits or, indeed, with any truly
conservative principles. The neoconservatives want a government oriented
to war and empire. True, they prefer a warfare state to a welfare state,
but this is hardly a prescription for reducing the size and role of
government.
On the contrary,
Devine argues, a global empire would make limited government at home
practically impossible. The militarization necessary for empire would
change domestic institutions too, as it is already beginning to do under
the rubric of “national security.” The slogans of “defense,” though
attractive to conservatives, are just as capable of indefinite expansion
as liberal slogans of “general welfare.”
Devine’s challenge
has already gotten a hostile reception from National Review,
once the bellwether of American conservatism; one of its writers calls
Devine’s manifesto “cracked.” Bill Buckley’s magazine has long since
abandoned its connection to the conservatism of Kendall, Frank Meyer,
Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Richard Weaver, Brent Bozell, and the young
Bill Buckley himself. It’s now a second-string organ of the
neoconservatives, eagerly echoing The Weekly Standard. Its
sassy independence and defiance of the Republican Party — its original
reason for being — is only a faint, fading memory. Today National
Review, born in dissatisfaction with Dwight Eisenhower, might pass
for a publication of the Republican National Committee.
Devine
wants American conservatism to be a vital force again. At the moment, what
passes for conservatism is only a variant of the liberalism it allegedly
opposes. As I’ve often said, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat
to our form of government. And for that we can thank many of the people
who call themselves conservatives. If it were up to Don Devine, I can
assure you it would be otherwise.
Out of the Bag
Nobody has ever called Paul Wolfowitz dumb. So it came as a
surprise when the hawkish deputy secretary of defense admitted to a
Vanity Fair interviewer that Iraq’s alleged “weapons of mass
destruction” hadn’t necessarily been the central reason for the recent
war. They were only one of several “bureaucratic reasons,” one which
“everyone [in the Bush administration] could agree on,” Wolfowitz said.
Belief in the very existence of those weapons is fading fast. If
Saddam Hussein had them, he didn’t use them when he most needed them. If
he hid them, they haven’t been found since the war ended. It transpires
that the administration distorted and exaggerated intelligence reports
concerning them, with the suave assistance of Colin Powell, who is now
handling damage control in the wake of Wolfowitz’s letting the cat out of
the bag. President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair still insist
that the WMDs do exist and will eventually be located — but when?
Bush is still very popular, but Blair isn’t. Unless those weapons
turn up, Blair may well be forced to resign. Unlike Bush, he staked his
whole case for war on WMDs. He may pay dearly for his lucidity. Both
Tories and Laborites are demanding to know whether he twisted the evidence
in order to manipulate public opinion in favor of a war that was very
unpopular in Britain to begin with. An official inquiry could end his
political career.
Bush, of course,
gave nebulous and shifting justifications for war. Though he was emphatic,
even obsessive, about WMDs, he also implied that Saddam Hussein was, or
might be, allied with al-Qaeda and other terrorist forces. He also
stressed Hussein’s human rights abuses, though this had nothing to do with
defending the United States from possible attack.
Bush also had
confusion on his side. Many Americans somehow got the impression that Iraq
was somehow behind the 9/11 attacks; many even thought that Saddam Hussein
and Osama bin Laden were the same man! Though Bush, of course, never said
anything so ludicrously false, without these absurd and widespread
misconceptions, verging on superstition, the war might never have won
popular support.
Sometimes, in
politics, it’s unnecessary for a leader to lie. He can merely let his
followers believe what they want to believe, without directly
contradicting them. The truth is great and will prevail, but by then it
may be too late to make any difference.
Joseph Sobran
Joe Sobran's Biography.
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