(Got your attention, didn’t I?)

Taking a moment away from cruising, Ramesh jumps into today’s how-much-jail-time? symposium:

The argument Anna Quindlen makes deserves an extended response. (How’s that for a statistically improbable phrase?) As it happens, I have just started work on an essay on the question of what criminal penalties logically follow from pro-life premises. As Justice Blackmun noted in Roe, many states’ anti-abortion laws did not impose criminal penalties on the women who sought or obtained abortions. Like Quindlen, he assailed this feature of the laws as irrational. I believe that it was and is rationally defensible: that pro-life premises do not require (or, for that matter, preclude) criminal penalties for these women. They do not even require (or preclude) criminal penalties for the abortionist. For now, let me just say this in defense of this conclusion: The crucial legal goal of the pro-life movement is not any particular set of punishments. It is that unborn children be protected in law. We could, for example, eventually secure laws that prohibited most abortions, that removed the medical licenses of doctors who committed illegal abortions, and that imposed fines on people who committed them without medical licenses. If that legal regime sufficed to protect unborn children, there would be no need to go further. The lack of jail time, I trust, would not stop Quindlen from opposing such laws. Indeed, she would probably not want to let such laws be enacted democratically.