Easy Answers to Puzzling Questions

Via Ezra, Jonah Goldberg asks why liberal bloggers aren’t reviewing The Party of Death, the book we’re assured is serious and non-partisan despite the fact that the elements of “death” happen to be carefully selected so as to entail no contradictions with the Republican platform. Well, hey, if they want to send me one I’ll review it. But as for why I’m not willing to plunk down $25, for someone who has to read about abortion a lot I just don’t find the angle provocative or interesting. Admittedly, Ponnuru is a smart guy, and since I’ve had to read a whole bunch of ostensibly pro-choice anti-Roe articles for an article with a looming deadline I frankly wouldn’t mind a genuinely rather than indirectly pro-forced-pregnancy argument as a chaser (and it must be said that Ponnuru’s analysis of what will happen if Roe is overturned is considerably more astute than the Jeffrey Rosens and William Saletans of the world.) But the problem is that the whole “culture of death” angle just isn’t of any interest; it’s the flipside of the “consistent life ethic” argument, which as I have previously noted “leaves all a priori positions as it found them.” I’m sure Ponnuru will have no problem exempting preventive wars and the death penalty and health care policy from “the party of death,” and the invocation of both “life” and “death” will fail to convince me that a 13-week-old fetus residing in a woman’s body is like a baby, so the argument is inherently superfluous. And, most importantly, the problem for the tiny minority of principled pro-lifers is that not only pro-choicers but most self-described pro-lifers act consistently with the premise that in fact abortion isn’t anything like infanticide. Ponnuru really needs to convince his supposed allies before the argument is worth taking seriously.