Tea at Trianon: You Can’t Support Abortion and Still Be a Conservative

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, August 2, 2018

You Can’t Support Abortion and Still Be a Conservative

Abortion is wrong even from an Enlightenment point of view. From Life Site:

Let’s be clear: legal abortion is at least as repugnant to conservative principles as any other proposition Goldberg or his colleagues have ever attempted to read out of the movement.

Finding a universally-accepted definition for a political philosophy can be tricky business, but most conservatives would agree that if nothing else, American conservatism is about conserving the principles of the American Founding. And while there’s naturally debate on how exactly to apply some of those principles, it’s pretty safe to say that the Declaration of Independence is essential.

It establishes that the core purpose of government is to secure the unalienable rights God has equally endowed on every human being – and among those rights, “life” is the first one listed. It’s the obvious prerequisite to exercising any of the other freedoms for which conservatism stands.

If you accept the Declaration’s premises, the only question remaining is one of fact, not philosophy: are the preborn the same kind of “life” Thomas Jefferson was writing about? The inarguable answer is yes.

According to all the established criteria of modern biology, a whole, distinct, living human exists once fertilization has occurred. To quote Goldberg’s National Review colleague Ramesh Ponnuru, from his 2006 book The Party of Death:

The formation of the embryo marks the beginning of a new human life: a new and complete organism that belongs to the human species. Embryology textbooks say so, with no glimmer of uncertainty or ambiguity [...] At each of our earlier stages of life, we have been, as we are now, whole living members of the species Homo sapiens. Honest and clear-eyed supporters of [liberal legal theorist Robert] Dworkin’s “choices for death” do not deny the biological facts. Rather, they argue that making choices to kill human beings, and allowing people to make these choices, can be justified.
As for pro-abortion counter-arguments, atheists deny human life has innate value or spiritual content prior to consciousness, “religious” pro-aborts falsely claim God is silent on the question, and radicals insist that none of the above outweighs “bodily autonomy.”

Pro-lifers have extensively refuted all of them, but the arguments all have something else in common besides being wrong: they all rest on premises utterly foreign to conservatism. Again, the divine value of human life is baked into the Declaration’s starting premise. John Locke is even more explicit about it: we are “all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker,” and as such are “made to last during his, not one another's pleasure” (what all this means for atheist/agnostic conservatives is a question for another day, but suffice to say that conservatives are supposed to see human rights as non-negotiable, whatever their source).

The idea that “bodily autonomy” entails a right to abort is similarly alien to conservative thought. It has no basis in America’s legal history from before the Founding through the Fourteenth Amendment, and is awfully hard to square with Locke’s conclusion that “all parents were, by the law of nature, under an obligation to preserve, nourish, and educate the children they had begotten.” (Read more.)