Abortion's new standard.

A PRIMER on logic and politics. Pick out the fallacies in this list of propositions: a) It is "wrong" for parents to torture their infants; therefore let us have tax incentives to encourage them to stop. b) Infanticide is "wrong," but let us uphold a neutral law so that parents can reach decisions according to their own consciences. c) Abortion is "wrong, and we plan to reduce it through aggressive, though voluntary and non-coercive, means."

The three propositions are of a piece. The first two reveal their moral vacuity at once. The third has been offered, with a straight face, in the most recent issue of The Weekly Standard, by Noemie Emery. Her article is part of a continuing effort to revise the Republican platform, which since 1980 has included a Human Life Amendment. Last year conservatives William Kristol and George Weigel suggested in NR that pro-lifers focus on more readily achievable objectives such as parental-consent laws or bans on third-trimester abortions. Pro-lifers could debate the prudence of this position within the context of shared objectives: a reduction in the number of abortions and legal recognition of the practice's injustice. Miss Emery, however, has disavowed anti-abortion laws as a goal -- and William Bennett has elsewhere made a less stark argument for concentrating on moral suasion rather than law.

Miss Emery at least forthrightly acknowledges that she would make the GOP a pro-choice party. But both she and Mr. Bennett would have conservatives strike a moral posture on abortion while avoiding uses of the law that might interfere with liberties many people have come to regard as important. Morality is converted then into high-sounding sentiments, but sentiments never quite taken seriously enough to find expression in the law.

No one, however, would brand the torture of infants as "wrong," and then hold back from forbidding it. Miss Emery and Mr. Bennett would reach a different judgment on abortion, and the reason is plain to everyone but them: they evidently do not regard abortion as "wrong" in the same sense that infanticide is wrong. (Miss Emery remarks tellingly that the fetus "is life but barely.") If they thought that real people were killed in these surgeries, they would be much more determined to restrain them.

What they offer, then, is a morality that conveniently avoids the sting of reproach; a morality without political cost, without bite, without edge, because it is finally without seriousness or substance.

Pro-lifers, on the other hand, have long ago absorbed the prudent judgment of Thomas Aquinas: that the purpose of the law is to lead people to virtue, not suddenly but gradually. Most pro-lifers are willing to begin with modest legal steps in the restriction of abortion -- including the commitment simply to preserve the life of any child who survives an abortion. Where is a comparable modesty or prudence on the other side? Where is the willingness, on the part of Senators Kennedy and Specter, to accept restraints even on a handful of abortions, such as the grisly "partial birth" abortions? The fact of the matter is that Noemie Emery and William Bennett have no audience on the pro-choice side. The pro-choicers will not concede even the slightest restriction on abortion, because any restriction implies its wrongness.

The real effect, then, of the teaching offered by Miss Emery and Mr. Bennett is to detach themselves and other conservatives from any genuine conviction about the grave wrongness of abortion. Republicans who heed them would merely undertake to redeem President Clinton's broken campaign promise to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare."