None of the above: why I'm sitting out the election.

Since former Commonweal columnist Sidney Callahan has confessed her past votes ("A Prolife Case against Bush," June 4), I'll confess to mine. During the last race I registered Republican to vote for John McCain in the primary, and voted in the general election for Ralph Nader, to protest our miserable choices. This time the choice is more serious, but much as I would like to vote against George W. Bush, I can't vote for John Kerry. The problem is with what the Democrats have become, which is in its way at least as depressing as what the Republicans have been for years.

I'm afraid I can't regard the issue of abortion as a minor thing. Our attitude toward life at this stage has much to say about what we believe about humanity as a whole: this is where we all come from, and at no point does it mean nothing. As in the cases of capital punishment and euthanasia, there is a combination of lethal individualism and a hardening of the heart involved in how we regard these matters of life and death. They are more than mere issues. This is not just a religious prohibition that happens to have united conservative Christians in recent years.

From the earliest years, Christians have found something antihuman in abortion. The Didache (ca. 100) says, "You shall not slay the child by abortion." The word used for abortion here--more particularly abortifacient medicine--is pharmakeia, which Paul condemns in Galatians. (This is usually understood to be a condemnation of occult formulas, but Paul, only a few decades before the Didache, may have meant the use of abortifacients.) Even though Augustine, among others, made a distinction between the formed and the unformed fetus, no early Christian writer saw this distinction as permission to abort, and St. Basil (330-379) rejects the distinction as essentially beside the point. Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-ca. 215) came closest to the point: he associated the destruction of the fetus with the destruction of love for humanity. This is life at its most vulnerable. We love it, or we don't. The argument that its size or early stage means that it is less meaningful as life is not far from the argument that we should prefer Arnold Schwarzenegger to an infant because he is larger and older.

Now the Democrats have become anything but neutral or open where this issue is concerned. It should shame them that there is a greater range of opinion available within the Republican Party. John McCain is prolife; Arlen Specter is prochoice. No Democrat who is running for office could afford to be prolife, vocally, and hope for party support. I think of what Lincoln said about those who advocated slavery, when he asked in his 1860 Cooper Union speech, "What will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly--done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated--we must place ourselves avowedly with them."

Mario Cuomo's "I'm personally opposed, but ..." in his famous 1984 Notre Dame speech was rightly seen as weak; you would never apply it to a moral issue you really cared about, like slavery or wife beating. This reduces the issue at hand, making opposition to abortion not so much about concern for life at its most vulnerable stage but rather something like Lenten fast regulations or the observance of holy days of obligation. If Cuomo personally opposed abortion only because that was a sectarian Catholic position, he is less reflective than he is reputed to be.

But wavering and unconvincing as the Cuomo line was, you could at least move from there to opposing late-term abortions (as prochoice Catholic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan did), or to supporting parental notification, both positions which a majority of Americans who are otherwise divided on the abortion issue could support. That would be Lincolnian; Lincoln knew that he could not at the time of the Cooper Union address eliminate slavery, but he could try to prevent its spread. Slavery, like abortion, was a fact on the ground and could not simply be eliminated. Its horror could, at least, be limited. There was, however, a limit to compromise: "Let us," Lincoln said, "be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances where-with we are so industriously plied and belabored--contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man--such as a policy of 'don't care' on a subject about which all true men do care."

The Democrats, though, have become cheerleaders. They lost me when they refused to let Pennsylvania's prolife Governor Robert Casey speak at their 1992 convention. Kerry's enthusiastic support for making late-term abortion legal, along with the prominence given to Ron Reagan Jr.'s defense of federal support for embryonic stem-cell research at the Democrats' convention in July, shows that there is a single party line on this issue.

It is an issue that matters, and the Democrats are as tin-eared and hardhearted as they could be about it. If Kerry loses to Bush, and this is seen as an issue that helped to sink him, I'll mourn Bush's victory and celebrate a well-deserved loss. I've talked with a number of people who are sitting this one out because of what the Democrats have allowed themselves to become. I'm with them.