Never Enough

William Voegeli, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, wrote a book a couple of years back titled "Never Enough:  America's Limitless Welfare State."  Voegeli's main contention was that modern liberalism does not have a limiting principle when it comes to how far a government can reach into the lives of regular citizens.  The limitless principle that Voegeli examines also applies to the debate surrounding the right to abortion.

In his column on The Catholic Thing, Hadley Arkes notes that those who hold the right to abortion as a constitutional right  based on high principles do not have a coherent idea of the limit to the exercise of that supposed right.  Arkes' work in the creation and passage of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act (it was signed into law by President Bush in 2002 and protects babies who survived an abortion) bears out this idea:

...the opposition understood our bill better than many of our friends, for they understood the principle that lay at the heart of the thing. They understood that, if they conceded that simple premise to us, we would be able to raise the kinds of questions that could unravel their position: What was so different about that child five minutes earlier – but then five hours, five weeks, five months before it was born?

A recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics featured two professors openly arguing--although after drawing fire they contended it was simply an "academic" argument--that newborn babies are not "actual persons" and thus do not have a "moral right to life."  Arkes notes that these professors had borne out the logic of the right to abortion, or, as he contends, the right to a dead baby:

Just why controversy should flare over this article may be a puzzle, since the argument was quite straightforward, drawn from the familiar logic of the argument for abortion: If a child in the womb is afflicted with conditions such as Down syndrome or other “deformities,” conditions that the authors think would justify aborting the child in the womb, why should it make a difference that the child has been born? The child may still not have a “life worth living.”

[...]

But why call these killings “after-birth abortions.” Why not homicides? The authors reply that these are not yet real persons who are killed, for they are aware of no life plan, no “aims” yet of their own. Neither of course are young chidren, and if the test is an awareness of “aims” in life, there may be many youngsters in college who are candidates for an “after-abortion.”

The more people who confront the logic of the right to abortion, the more they recoil from what they see.  The moral sense of the people is still alive and well.