This is our moment; we should have the wit to seize it.

Did Senator Lee Forget 

the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act?

by Hadley Arkes

We don't need a new resolution from Congress to address the wrongs of clinics like Kermit Gosnell's--the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act already serves that purpose, and we should restore the civil penalties originally attached to it.

I want to thank Christopher Tollefsen for doing a lovely, thoughtful, penetrating reprise of the argument in my book, Natural Rights & the Right to Choose: namely, that as people have talked themselves into the "right to choose abortion," they have had to talk themselves out of the logic of natural rights.

James Wilson raised the question, if we have natural rights, when do they begin? And the answer was that they begin as soon as we begin to be, which is why, as he said, the common law casts protection over human life from the first stirring in the womb--which is to say, as it is known that the offspring is there.

One way or another, the partisans of abortion have had to talk themselves out of the notion that the human being inside the womb has any intrinsic moral worth, the source in turn of rights of intrinsic worth. But if that is true for the child in the womb, it is true for the rest of us as well. If we have rights then, we can get them only when they are conferred by the people with the power to confer them. And so even if there were such a thing as a "right to abortion," it is a right stripped of its moral logic. It would be a right conferred by the powerful, and it could be withdrawn by the powerful when it no longer serves their interest.

But Tollefsen raised the issue of the book in a timely way because of Kermit Gosnell's trial. For the book also contained a memoir of that "most modest first step" in legislating on abortion: the move to protect simply the child who survived an abortion. That was our bill, cast in that awful legislative language, as the Born-Alive Infants' Protection Act in 2002.

Tollefsen's piece is especially timely because of an unfolding scandal, not among liberals, but among conservatives and even pro-life organizations.

Fox News started twitting the liberal media for their pervasive refusal to cover the Gosnell trial and what it revealed about the logic of "abortion rights." But the conservative media--and most unaccountably of all, the pro-life organizations--have filtered from their own accounts any reminder that we have indeed passed a federal law to bar the kinds of killing carried out in Dr. Gosnell's "clinic."

I posted a piece in the Weekly Standard to point out this screening by conservatives--and what we are losing now, in a critical teaching moment, by not using this crisis at hand to bring attention back to the Born-Alive Act.

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