6/05/00 4:40 p.m.
The Next Pro-Life Fight
The babies that survive abortion.

By NR's Ramesh Ponnuru & John J. Miller

ichard Garnett, a professor at Notre Dame's law school, neatly summarizes the legal issues at stake in the partial-birth abortion case in the latest Weekly Standard. He does, however, commit one important error. He writes, “Abortion-rights advocates do concede — for now, at least — that babies enjoy full legal protection once these children are ‘born.’” Sadly, this is not true.

The law as it stands does not mark the outer limits of the abortion right that the Supreme Court has established. From time to time one hears of cases involving babies who survive attempted abortions. It is an open question if the law mandates some level of care for them, or even some protection against being killed, or if the right to abortion entails the right to a successful abortion. At least one court has ruled that state law cannot protect such a “fetus,” and the Supreme Court has never repudiated that ruling. That's why Hadley Arkes, a professor of jurisprudence at Amherst and a leading pro-lifer, has proposed for 12 years that a law be passed to make sure that they are protected. (Arkes originally made the proposal in NR.) And that's why Florida congressman Charles Canady has introduced the “Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2000.”

Part of the point is to bring the true radicalism of current law to public attention. As it stands, even some well-informed pro-lifers underestimate the problem.

GIVE THAT MAN AN NEA GRANT
Al Gore displays yet another reason why he has the skills and experience to be president, this time for Julia Reed, who describes Gore's visit to an Ohio elementary school in the June issue of Vogue: “Ms. Pace asks him if he would like to make a collage, and a startled Gore utters a slightly nervous 'Uhhhh' followed by a rather touchingly determined 'Yeah.' For the next quarter of an hour, the vice president of the United States puts his head down and sets about carefully drawing on a piece of construction paper, poring over magazines, working with his child-sized scissors and glue, shielding his work from prying eyes. He is going to finish his collage, and it is going to be good, even if it means ignoring his aides, even if it means being late for a meeting with parents and teachers. Finally, long after the press has been escorted from the room, he turns in his work. When I see the teacher later, I ask her what her star pupil has made. 'The Earth,' she says. Of course. 'And it was beautiful, too.'

“In fact, it was — a gorgeous Matisse-like globe floating in space, complete with the surgeon general's warning that 'cigarettes contain carbon monoxide' in the bottom-left-hand corner, over which Gore had signed his name. The next day, at the vice president's official residence, in Washington, I tell him that I was crazy about what he'd made. 'Really? Did you see it? Did you see the pyramid I glued on Egypt?'”