Kevin Collins: Really a pro-lifer? Bush should choose

With the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003 now law, Congress and the president have closed the latest chapter in the continuing saga that is the legislative fight over abortion. However, this is not the first and will not be the last word in the story.

One of the lesser-known chapters is the tale of the short-lived "Daschle alternative." In 1997, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle introduced a measure that would have prohibited all abortions after the fetus was viable outside the womb, leaving exceptions to protect against death or "grievous" threats to the mother's health.

Why haven't you heard of this before? Because the abortion rights and anti-abortion forces combined to defeat it, preferring to fight over banning a particular procedure, called partial birth abortion by its opponents, rather than debating a policy that would both limit the number of abortions performed while protecting women's health.

After President Clinton vetoed similar bills, President Bush signed the new law on Nov. 6. Before signing it, he declared, "Every person, however frail or vulnerable, has a place and a purpose in this world. Every person has a special dignity. The right to life cannot be granted or denied by government, because it does not come from government, it comes from the creator of life."

Wait a minute -- every person? It's not that I disagree with the principle of human dignity, but does Bush himself actually believe it?

As governor of Texas, he signed over 100 death warrants in a death penalty system that he fully supported. What about the place and purpose of the men and women he sent to die? Even worse, in discussing the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, he mocked the woman's pleas to spare her life. Taking sadistic joy in sentencing a woman to die is hardly taking a pro-life position.

And then there is Iraq and the citizens who ended up as "collateral damage" in Bush's pursuit of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Sure, war is sometimes necessary and people die as a result. But Just War Theory requires that war be the last option.

It is now becoming increasingly clear that the Bush administration was hellbent on war and disregarded alternatives. On the same day that Bush signed the new abortion law, The New York Times published a report detailing back-channel attempts last spring by the Hussein regime to avert war by offering U.S. investigators full access and other concessions to boot. Going ahead with the war anyhow hardly shows respect for the special dignity of human life.

So if Bush is not really pro-life, why pass this law? There are two possibilities. The first is a straightforward desire to restrict reproductive freedom, a position with a long if ignoble history. This would explain the Bush administration's support of abstinence-only sex education over the comprehensive version which teaches the use of contraception, a program that drastically reduces teen pregnancy. In the present day, however, the "keep 'em cooking, barefoot and pregnant" philosophy has lost most of its political currency, so such thinkers now turn to the pro-life movement for support at the polls.

And that, political support, is the second and more likely reason that Bush and other conservative faux-lifers have gotten behind this law; they are interested in the electoral rather than legal consequences. During Clinton's presidency, they timed votes on the issue to match up with the election calendar, and they didn't pass the Daschle alternative in 1997 because it would have helped resolve the debate.

Even if you disagree with it, the true pro-life perspective deserves respect for its consistency and moral clarity. Actual pro-lifers, whom you can find in any Catholic church in the country, act out of conscious and for the welfare of others. That Bush and other conservatives are taking these people for a ride all the way to the voting booth is saddening.

Reading other columns in this paper, one might think that being a Catholic and a Democrat, especially a moderately pro-choice one as I am, are mutually exclusive possibilities. While that internal struggle is a topic for another column, to put it briefly, it is not inconsistent to support a right yet oppose its practice (think hate speech) nor is it impossible to support a right generally but accept that constitutional guarantees are still subject to reasonable limits (think gun ownership). The actions of Tom Daschle show that the quandary of the Catholic Democrat can be resolved.

The fate of the new law now rests in the hands of black-robed men and women. As some judges are likely to adhere to past precedent and others are likely to defer to Congress, it is a fate upon which I will not speculate.

What I will say, however, is that while Bush may mouth pro-life words, he does not embrace those values. He needs either to stop claiming these principles or start using them. As the next chapter in this saga is written, both the pro-life movement and America as a whole deserve something other than fiction.

Kevin Collins is a sophomore Political Science major from Milwaukee, Wis.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.