From: ece_0028@bigdog.engr.arizona.edu (David Anderson)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,talk.abortion
Subject: Re: Abortion will never be criminalized. (WAS rights and responsibilities)
Date: 16 Dec 92 18:18:01 GMT
Organization: University of Arizona

"...what the [Supreme] court does about Roe v. Wade will not, in the
judgement of serious folk, save a single doomed fetus.  If Roe v. 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 mood of
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 that 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, Mr Howard Fast, writing in the New York Observer.
Howard Fast introduces only a single auto-biographical line into
his column.  He says, 'I have been active in one part and another
of the peace movement over the past forty years.'  Now, 1989 minus
forty equals 1949.  In 1949, Howard Fast was the true Stalinist
Stakhanovite, writing not only newspaper articles defending Moscow
but also infusing Marx into American history, as in his effort
(Citizen Tom Paine) to make Tom Paine more of a comreade than he really
was.  Now to be sure, Fast repudiated Stalin when Khrushchev did, and 
perhaps believes today that the cold war is over, which one supposes
would make him a Reaganite.
"  But Mr. Fast is enraged by the Lifers and uses an argument we
here increasingly:  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 sixty thousand 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 zookeeper and the ailing coalminer.'  You
can't organize to defend the freedom to travel without simultaneously
organizing to defend the freedom to die.  Or, I guess--Mr Fast has
always confused me about freedom--the freedom not to die.
"  The Lifers are, by Mr 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.  It is only left for Mr Fast to close the logic
of his own argument, which would involve him in a syllogistic attempt
along the lines of:
	Everyone alive suffers.
	Suffering is bad.
	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 go to hell.  To decry the extermination of an
unborn child doesn't require you to oppose hanging Adolf Eichmann."

	--William Buckley, National Review, 2/24/89, pg 63
	[typos and emphasis mine]