Which is to say that, when push comes to shove, when it's your daughter who's stuck marrying the psychopath or skipping Yale to take up single motherhood in your retirement home in St. Bart's, it's not a pro-life stance at all. It's idle moralism, freeloading off a pro-choice culture. When Gail got pregnant, Barr drove her to the abortion clinic and paid for the procedure. Barr's supporters insist he wasn't pro-life back then. They should realize that that goes without saying.
Abortion turns out to be an indispensable part of the normal middle-American toolkit.
If Republicans like Governor Bush are giving up on the issue, it's because they've figured out that, even if Republicans win on abortion, they lose. The most they could hope to achieve is to shake middle-class life to its foundations in the name of values that, at the end of the day, neither they nor the middle class actually holds. We should distrust the pro-life spin that Americans are more conflicted over abortion than citizens of other Western countries. The Bauer-Buchanan wing of the Republican Party would court voters by promising to expose them as hypocrites. Lots of luck.