Response to Greg on Abortion, Biographies, etc.

Greg, thanks very much for your response.  Mark McKenna has already made some good points about the risks of using personal biographies (along with the good, you have to take the bad that exists in all of us even pro-life politicians).  Look, let me reiterate that I think Sarah Palin's witness on Down's syndrome is great, as is Cindy McCain's adopting a child.  But I think that our debate about whether uses of personal biographies are "selective" ends up being parasitic, to a significant extent, on the debate about what policies are relevant to the abortion issue.  You say you're willing to consider that "new or expanded government programs and spending . . . may enhance the quality of life and thereby discourage more people from" aborting, but your arguments after that seem premised on ignoring the connection between supporting the poor and reducing abortions.

For example, you write that being a community organizer "says little about whether one is committed to protecting unborn [life]"....  Well, that's plainly true about Obama's subjective attitude, but it simply dodges the point that we who are pro-life should still commend work that empowers poor people, whatever the worker's motivation, because that work will reduce people's perceived needs to abort.  Thus to ignore such an element in a candidate's personal biography is still, even with respect to pro-life concerns, "selective."  Then you go on to suggest that for a pro-lifer to place a lot of emphasis on social-welfare support programs is to be willing to accept "money . . . to suppress a principle for political gain," although you also refer to suppressing pro-life principle in return for "potentially worthwhile programs."  I'm not sure which you think people would be suppressing principle for -- mere "political gain" or "potentially worthwhile programs."  But either way this dodges, again, the argument that wanting more social-welfare supports can actually be a way of serving pro-life principles, not of compromising them for other goals.

One might argue about whether social-welfare spending helps reduce abortion (although I think there's considerable evidence that it does if it's well targeted).  But I think that your post, while it never argues against such a connection and even allows that it might exist, ends up ignoring it.  And ignoring it, I think, leads you to treat the comparison between the two parties on abortion as more one-sided than it is (which, again, is not to deny the major faults in the Democrats' platform).