On abortion

There is a helpful piece by Robert P. George in the latest issue of The City; it is taken from his opening comments from the National Press Club in D.C.

Having cited Obama's words at the 2009 Notre Dame commencement, George says:

The President is right. His view regarding the status, dignity, and rights of the child in the womb, and the view shared by Professor Kmiec and myself, are irreconcilable. A chasm separates those of us who believe that every living human being possesses profound, inherent, and equal dignity, and those who, for whatever reasons, deny it. This issue really cannot be fudged, as people sometimes try to do by imagining that there is a dispute about whether it is really a human being who is dismembered in a dilation and curettage abortion, or whose skin is burned off in a saline abortion, or the base of whose skull is pierced and whose brains are sucked out in a dilation and extraction (or "partial birth") abortion. That issue has long been settled--and it was settled not by religion or philosophy, but by the sciences of human embryology and developmental biology.

So it is clear that what divides us as a nation--and what divides Barack Obama, on one side, from Robert George and Douglas Kmiec, on the other--is not whether the being whose life is taken in abortion and in embryo-destructive research is a living individual of the human species--a human being; it is whether all human beings, or only some, possess fundamental dignity and a right to life. ("Obama and Abortion," The City (Summer 2009): 68)

Each group seeks to protect individual rights, and couches their case in "rights" language. The differences lay in how each camp understands those rights. For pro-lifers, individual rights are extended broadly, reaching the unborn. For those on the pro-choice side, individual rights are directed to the mother's right to choose. Pro-choice people do not believe individual rights should be applied to those humans that are unborn and unwanted.