Big Conservatism, or the Big Con, having long ago fused with the GOP, embodies its vision in the Republican Party platform.\u00a0 One of the planks of the latter is the Big Con\u2019s \u201cpro-life\u201d position on abortion.<\/p>\n
Now, the most fundamental reason for opposing abortion is that it consists in the killing of an innocent, defenseless human being, a yet-to-be-born child.\u00a0 This being so, the circumstances in which a child in the womb is conceived are about as morally relevant to the fate of that child as are the circumstances surrounding the conception of the reader of this essay morally relevant to determining his<\/em> fate.<\/p>\n The circumstances of a human being\u2019s entrance into this world have utterly zero <\/em>relevance to whether he should live or die.<\/p>\n Yet the merchants of the Big Con, for all of their rhetorical hosannas (particularly during election season) to the sanctity of human life, have a decidedly different track record.<\/p>\n Take the Big Con\u2019s Patron Saint, Ronald Reagan. The 40th<\/sup> POTUS continues to be tirelessly depicted as pro-life.\u00a0 Yet Reagan opposed abortion except for when he didn\u2019t oppose it.\u00a0 In other words, he claimed to oppose abortion in all instances except those of rape, incest, <\/em>and when the life of the mother is endangered. <\/em><\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, this <\/em>tends to be the Big Con\u2019s default position on abortion.\u00a0 That it is at once a cop-out and inconsistent should be obvious to anyone who slows down the three seconds necessary to see it for what it is.\u00a0 It is the logical and moral equivalent of the view that the death penalty is wrong\u2014except for when it is administered to murderers, rapists, and child sex predators, etc.<\/p>\n Obviously, anyone who holds this view is not<\/em> opposed to the death penalty.\u00a0 Since the whole point of capital <\/em>punishment is to reserve its use only for those who are convicted of the most egregious of offenses, anyone who favors its use in these \u201cexceptional\u201d cases is a proponent, <\/em>not an opponent, <\/em>of it.<\/p>\n Similarly, the whole point of opposing abortion is to protect innocent<\/em> human life. Thus, those who claim to be protectors of the most innocent and defenseless among us while simultaneously relinquishing that protection due to circumstances\u2014like the violence in which conception occurred\u2014that don\u2019t in any way undercut that innocence and defenselessness undermine the principle reason for opposing abortion in the first place.<\/p>\n This, though, was Reagan\u2019s position.<\/p>\n Nor should this surprise anyone when it is considered that as governor of California\u2014several years before Roe v. Wade, <\/em>mind you\u2014Reagan legalized <\/em>abortion via the \u201cTherapeutic Abortion Act.\u201d\u00a0 Courtesy of the Gipper\u2019s move, approximately one million <\/em>babies were killed in their mothers\u2019 wombs.<\/p>\n Reagan would later blame this ghastly phenomenon on\u2026doctors.\u00a0 <\/em>Physicians, he insisted, misinterpreted the law that he signed.\u00a0 Yet even before the legalized slaughtering got under way and after he had signed the bill into law, Reagan remarked that had he been more experienced in the art of governing, he would not have signed it.<\/p>\n Lou Cannon, a Reagan biographer, said that Reagan did in fact come to regret his decision.\u00a0 It\u2019s not clear, though, exactly what it is about this decision that Reagan regretted, for Cannon quickly added that Reagan \u201cknew that the [previous] California law [on abortion] was overly restrictive<\/em>\u201d and \u201cwas particularly bothered that it made no exception for rape or incest<\/em>\u201d (emphases added).<\/p>\n Furthermore, for the eight years of his Presidency, Reagan proposed not a single piece of pro-life legislation.<\/p>\n George W. Bush, another two-term \u201cconservative\u201d Republican president who was widely hailed as a champion of the unborn, was no more pro-life than Reagan. It\u2019s true that he signed a ban on so-called \u201cpartial-birth abortion,\u201d as well as signing the Born Alive Infants Protection Act and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.\u00a0 It\u2019s equally true that none of these actions made an iota\u2019s worth of difference when it came to preventing a single scheduled abortion.<\/p>\n But matters were even worse than this.<\/p>\n For starters, Bush continually insisted throughout his presidency that he does not have a \u201clitmus\u201d test for nominating judges. In other words\u2014follow the logic here\u2014although he ostensibly viewed abortion, the killing of a defenseless child in the womb, as a great evil, Bush refused to hold it against judicial prospects if they disagreed with him on this score.<\/p>\n Although he supposedly regarded the act of destroying innocent human beings as unjust, Bush had no moral or other objections to endowing judges with the authority and power to rule in favor of those who would destroy these human beings.<\/p>\n If you can\u2019t see that this position is as intellectually incoherent as it is morally contradictory, then there\u2019s nothing more that can be said.<\/p>\n Second, Bush refused <\/em>to lend support to South Dakota\u2019s ban on abortion in all instances except for when the mother\u2019s life was endangered by her pregnancy.\u00a0\u00a0 As he told ABC<\/a> news at the time: \u201cWell\u2026my position has always been three exceptions: rape, incest and the life of the mother.\u201d<\/p>\n The South Dakota ban, in short, was too \u201crestrictive\u201d for Bush\u2019s taste.<\/p>\n