Kevin Drum responds to my post on this topic from earlier today.

Whenever I write about abortion, I usually get a bunch of tweets or emails asking if I even understand the conservative position. Answer: of course I do. Most conservatives say that abortion is murder. Given that premise, their opposition to funding abortion, legalizing abortion, using some day-after pills, selling fetal tissue, and so forth, makes sense.
So I’m going to ask the mirror image question here: does Ponnuru understand the liberal position on abortion? Most of us don’t think of fetuses as persons, which means abortion doesn’t involve killing a human being in any meaningful sense. Given that premise, our support of funding abortion, legalizing abortion, promoting day-after pills, selling fetal tissue, and so forth, makes sense.

I’m not sure Drum even understands my post.

Drum is of course correct that if you regard an unborn child as having no more moral weight than a carrot you will support selling fetal tissue. That socially liberal premises lead to socially liberal conclusions is trivially true, and undisputed by me. What I said in my post is that most people don’t regard unborn children that way, and that it’s a good thing they don’t.

Many of the arguments that are made in public for the pro-choice position on abortion are not explicitly based on the insignificance of fetal lives. Think of all the arguments that depict abortion as a sad necessity. This soft pro-choice position does not logically entail being okay with haggling over the price of fetal remains. Which leads me to the third point I made, which was that Sarah Silverman is wrong to suggest that legal abortion implies that view.

Update:

A reader makes a good point via email: “There’s one more thing to consider. Remember the stem-cell debate? Even some pro-lifers justified using discarded embryos for research because they were just going to die anyway. And pro-choicers said that pro-lifers were irrational to disagree with that. For all I know, Silverman was trying to make the same point. It’s good to explain that the logically consistent position for prolifers is to be against this.”