GOP PRO-LIFERS PUSHED DOLE INTO A GOOD DECISION.

Byline: Brad Stetson 

AS the Republican Party's quadrennial hand-wringing over its official anti-abortion position crescendoed last week, moderates exhorted the GOP to recognize the legitimacy of a woman's right to choose.

Bob Dole, the Great Compromiser, was eager to oblige, but fortunately, conservatives saved him from himself. For the fact is there are solid political and moral reasons why a tepid, equivocal pro-life statement would have been a mistake.

Politically, easing opposition to abortion is misguided because the GOP's pro-life position is not a liability. If it were, Republicans would not have won three of the last four presidential elections, as well as unprecedented victories in 1994 - with no pro-life incumbent losing, and pro-life challengers defeating over 30 clear abortion advocates.

But more important are the moral dimensions of the pro-life argument. Bold, public emphasis on these themes can expose the politically correct edifice of ``choice'' as a Potemkin Village of myths and falsehoods, and prove Bob Dole a principled leader who will speak for the silent unborn.

For example, he could dispute the slogan, ``Abortion is between a woman and her doctor.'' Planned Parenthood statistics show the overwhelming majority of abortions occur in high-volume abortion clinics, not in the office of a woman's personal physician. The woman does not see the unfamiliar doctor until she is gowned and in stirrups, prepped for the abortion. And of course, clinic doctors are not available for post-abortion counseling.

Women who are troubled must find that out on their own, as did NancyJo Mann, founder of Women Exploited By Abortion. Abortion was hardly an empowering experience for her. Of it she wrote, ``For two hours I could feel her struggling inside me. But then, as suddenly as it began, she stopped. Even today, I remember her very last kick on my left side. She had no strength left. She gave up and died. Despite my grief and guilt, I was relieved that her pain was finally over. But I was never the same again. The abortion killed not only my daughter, it killed a part of me.''

Abortion is not between a woman and her doctor, but rather a woman, an unborn child and a for-profit abortionist.

Dole also could contest that ``a woman has a right to control her own body.'' Having an abortion is not controlling one's body. To abort is to surrender control of one's body in a most complete way. It is to acknowledge that one's lack of self-control has created an intolerable situation, and one must now submit to a thoroughly unnatural procedure to remedy this situation.

Significantly, more than one-third of women who have aborted report they did so in capitulation to pressure from someone else, usually a man. This hardly presents abortion as the act of women's self-assertion that advocates of ``choice'' describe. Abortion liberates men, not women; it looses men from sexual responsibility and restraint.

Further, Dole could dissent from the ridiculous platitude, ``No one knows when human life begins.'' Of course we do. The unborn human being has a unique and permanent genetic identity (since conception); a beating heart (since 3-1/2 weeks); detectable brain activity (since six weeks); fully formed fingers, toes and all internal organs (since eight weeks). By three months, this human being is forming fists, bending arms, curling toes and rapidly growing.

This is not a potential life; it is an actual life, with potential. This reality is so compelling that even leading pro-choice feminists like Naomi Wolfe and Camille Paglia have recently acknowledged it and called for their comrades to frankly admit that every abortion kills a human life.

Those who have seen ultrasound images of unborn babies have eyewitness, empirical evidence of the unborns' humanity. When my wife gave birth to our son recently, we instantly recognized features we had been watching for months by ultrasound; the shape of his nose and forehead, his long, thin fingers and persistent thumb-sucking. He was newborn, but he was already quite familiar to us. He had long been fully formed and fully alive.

Yet prenatal life can be violently destroyed for any reason. A bizarre double-mindedness exists in American life: We personally and institutionally cherish unborn human beings - and nurture them to birth - while at the same time we personally and institutionally destroy them, all depending upon the pregnant woman's attitude toward them, an attitude often distorted by pressure from the man in her life to abort.

But obviously nothing changes in the nature of the human fetus. The aborted are intrinsically no different from those who survive the vagaries of ``choice.'' If allowed to be born they would be as beautiful and full of promise as the wanted. But as a society we have decided that membership in the human family is not determined by biology, rather by a mother's feelings toward her offspring.

The common resort to ``I oppose abortion but support a woman's right to choose'' does not relieve us of this hypocrisy, since no one who holds this confession would countenance the killing of people living outside a woman's womb.

The logic of ``choice'' must perversely hold that the unborn - unless their mothers want them - are not human beings worth including in the human community. We have decided that humanity is subjective, and the powerful may bestow human standing on the vulnerable as they will.

Pro-life voters assert that the profound contradiction between how we treat the unborn when they are wanted and what we do to them when they are not wanted creates a corrosive social consciousness of might makes right and moral relativism. They are unwilling to exalt politics above principle and look the other way, as moderates recommend, and be passive during the slaughter of the innocents just to (allegedly) get a Republican into the White House.

Now the bright sun will shine on Bob Dole and all the party faithful in San Diego, but will their hearts and minds be illumined, and will they find the integrity to proclaim truth to the idols of our selfish and violent age?

MEMO: Brad Stetson is editor of the anthology ``The Silent Subject: Reflections on the Unborn in American Culture'' (Praeger Publishers, 1996). He is also the director of The David Institute, a Southern California social research group, and a lecturer in religious studies at Cal State Long Beach.