Kristen Day, the head of Democrats for Life of America, has recently published an interesting piece entitled “Politics and the Culture of Life: Why I Am Still a Democrat” (in the Notre Dame Journal of Law Ethics and Public Policy). Since I also would like to think of myself as a Democrat, I took a look at essay. It has some great ideas for helping empower women to choose life, but it also seems to me to contain a quite common mistake, reflecting a deep ambiguity in the term "pro-life" itself. By conflating non-violence with helping (e.g. confusing not killing babies with helping them and their mothers), she seems to imply that the Democratic Party is as pro-life as (or even more pro-life than) the Republican Party—even on the abortion issue alone.

This is a strategic mistake, because it encourages the Democrats to think they don’t have to change, to think that all they have to do is to put a new spin on their message. Far better for Democrats for Life of America to tell the Party that it has to unhitch itself from Roe if it wants to survive. DFLA may be missing an especially teachable moment in national politics.

But it is also a deep ethical-political error in her essay. Only on the basis of non-violence can humanitarian sentiments not become diabolical. We saw this in Russia under the Soviets, but here’s a more concrete example I use for my students: Recall that (real) case of three shipwrecked sailors and one cabin boy who were all four starving to death in a lifeboat. One is to take it as a known fact that if the three sailors did not kill and eat the cabin boy all four would die. Now, if the purpose of the rule against killing is to preserve life, they arguably should feast away, because that way they would at least save three lives rather than having all four die. (Indeed, if one of the sailors had tried to prevent the other two from killing and eating the boy, that sailor could not be considered pro-life, because he would be causing extra deaths.) Note how the good sentiment of wishing to save lives becomes a reason to kill the innocent.

We are led to this strange conclusion because we have wrongly imagined that the sole purpose of the rule against killing is to save lives. I maintain that saving lives is not its primary purpose, either legally or morally. Rather, its main purpose is to prevent violence. The utilitarian reason for a rule not to kill our neighbor is not so much to make her live longer as to make sure that as long as she lives she can trust us, can turn her back to us without fearing a knife in her back. In the lifeboat context, the rule against all killing is what keeps the four men working together for survival rather than each watching for the chance to bite before being bitten. From a religio-moral point of view, the idea behind the rule is an inclusive foundation for community, an insistence on inherent human inviolability rather than on length of life.

Killing is our main enemy, much more than death. It is far better for four deaths to occur than for one murder to occur. Death is not inherently evil, nor can it be avoided. We’re all going to die; I hope none of us will be murdered. For these reasons, I think the phrase "Respect Life" far better than "Pro-Life" to get at the core issue at stake. (I elaborate on this theme, at a much more abstract level, in “The Priority of Respect”, 44 International Philosophical Quarterly 165-84 (2004).

The late pope used to make a similar point when he wrote that all other rights are meaningless if there is no right not to be killed. And I think this may also be what the Catholic bishops were getting at when they revised their “seamless garment” image a few years ago, substituting (as I recall) the “House of Life” image.  The rules against direct and intentional killing our neighbor form the necessary foundation for the house. Once the foundation is solid, then walls (i.e. the myriad ways of preserving and enhancing life) must be added, but you have to start with the foundation.

What I would say to the Democrats is this: “You have a tremendous opportunity before you. Right now you cannot be considered to respect life because you support intentional killing on a massive scale. But if you were to reverse yourself here, you would not just pull even with the Republicans, but would instantly come out way ahead of them for pro-life voters like myself--because you would be ready to build not only the foundation of the House of Life (as are the Republicans) but the walls as well (as the Republicans seem not to be).”