Raw numbers

Human Life Review, Fall 1999 by Ponnuru, Ramesh

Orderliness is, after all, the quintessential bourgeois virtue, and everyone knows that children tend to upset order. Abortion, on the other hand, allows young women to continue with their plans, which usually include having children at some later time-when they've planned for it. Anti-abortionists tend to scoff at the pro-abortionists' claim that they are pro-children, but that's a mistake. The owners of those bumper stickers that say "Pro-Child Pro-Family Pro-Choice" may be deluded, but they are not dishonest. They think that they have to be able to invest phenomenal sums in their children to raise them well, and they will be able to invest more in each child if they have fewer children and have them according to plan. This is what Planned Parenthood means.

It's what Jerry Z. Muller meant when he wrote "The Conservative Case for Abortion" a few years back in The New Republic. While the familiar liberal case for abortion centers on choice, the conservative case is that abortion protects middle-class family values. But precisely because Muller's case does not hinge on choice, it supplies all the premises for, and no premises against, a regime of forced abortion. (A similar point could be made about a related argument, that abortion should be tolerated because it reduces crime and other social problems.) By laying out this vision of bourgeois order explicitly, Muller exposes the darkness at its heart.

Anti-abortionists, on the other hand, know that family values cannot be protected by killing members of the family; that, as Frederica MathewesGreen has said, "In the land where mothers kill their unborn children, every lesser love grows frail."

Christopher Caldwell is always perceptive, and he's clearly right that abortion rights are woven into the structure of our society in all sorts of ways. (As other evils have been in ages past.) One of the few incontrovertible, if overwrought, statements in the Supreme Court's decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) was that "for two decades ... people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail."

Which is another way of saying that Roe v. Wade has worked enormous changes in our society that will be hard to undo. As we already knew.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review magazine.