Is Herman Cain Pro-Life?

Over at Commentary, Pete Wehner, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, takes Hermain Cain to task for his interesting answer on abortion during an interview with Piers Morgan this past week (does anyone watch that show, anyone?).  Here is Wehner:

According to Cain, he believes life begins at conception. When it comes to abortions there should be no rape or incest exceptions. But–and it’s a mighty big but–“it comes down to it’s not the government’s role or anybody else’s role to make that decision.” Cain then went on to say this: “So what I’m saying is it ultimately gets down to a choice that that family or that mother has to make. Not me as president, not some politician, not a bureaucrat. It gets down to that family. And whatever they decide, they decide. I shouldn’t have to tell them what decision to make for such a sensitive issue.”

Cain later declared that he is 100% pro-life.  But if Cain's declaration merely affirms his understanding displayed in the interview above, then he is certainly in no way pro-life.  HotAir documents Cain's almost indecipherable stance on abortion through the years.

As Hadley Arkes has pointed out time and time again, saying that abortion is all about a "choice" totally rips the moral principles completely out of the equation.  For this is the same argument present during the antebellum period by those who argued that the question of slavery be left up to the people of the territories.  Stephen Douglas, who, to find a compromise, authored the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 which would leave the "choice" of whether a territory would have slavery or not up to the people in the territories.  But, as Lincoln said, no one has a right to do a wrong; no one has a right through the democratic process to choose something completely at odds with the principles of democracy itself.  By saying that it is valid to have a vote on slavery, slavery is then no longer a wrong but is within a group of unobjectionable things that the citizens can debate on.  In Cain's implicit logic, if this is what he really believes, there is little difference in principle on citizens debating between what day they would like their garbage to be picked up and whether or not they would like have slaves helping them with their daily chores.  To believe in "choice" is to say nothing about what ends that choice is directed towards.

UPDATE:

At the blog for the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein notes Cain's latest attempt to clarify his abortion stance during an interview with FoxNews:

Cain attempted to argue that when he said in a CNN interview earlier this week that the decision was ultimately up to the family, what he really meant was that it was up the family as to whether they wanted to break the law.

“I do not think abortion should be legal in this country,” Cain said on Fox today. “Abortion should not be legal. That is clear. But if a family made the decision to break the law, that’s that family’s decision.”

Very strange.  You wonder on something this important why he doesn't have a firmer grasp of these things.