Fred Thompson’s appearance on Meet the Press piqued my interest for another reason. An excerpt:

MR. RUSSERT: I went back–we went back to your papers at the University of Tennessee and read through them. This is what you said back in 1994 as a candidate. Here’s the first one: “I’m not willing to support laws that prohibit early-term abortions. I’m not suddenly upon election as a senator going to know when life begins and where that place ought to be exactly. It comes down to whether you believe life begins at conception. I don’t know in my own mind if that is the case so I don’t feel the law ought to impose that standard on other people.” MR. THOMPSON: Yeah. MR. RUSSERT: So you yourself don’t know when life begins. MR. THOMPSON: No. I didn’t know then. MR. RUSSERT: You know now? MR. THOMPSON: I, I, I–my head has always been the same place. My public position has always been the same. I’ve been 100 percent pro-life in every vote that I’ve ever cast in, in my service to the United States Senate.

Me: Obviously I’m invested in defending the uncertainty case for being pro-life as it’s my own position. But this is a good example of how completely the pro-choice side owns the logic of uncertainty. It seems perfectly natural and reasonable that if you’re not sure life begins at conception, you have to be pro-choice. But that doesn’t necessarily follow at all. As Reagan said, if you see a sack on the road that may contain puppies, you don’t go over and kick it.

Ironically, the left owns the logic of caution and uncertainty on so many issues, from the precautionary principle in environmentalism (unless you’re positive it won’t hurt the environment, you shouldn’t do it) to its rage against cost-benefit analysis to its passionate opposition to any kind of free-market entitlement reform. So while drilling for oil in ANWR might, maybe, possibly, in some scenarios conceivably, cause harm to some caribou in a place no one will ever go and therefore it must not be done, a sweeping right to abort fetuses that quite reasonably could be called human beings is a no-brainer unless all doubt of any kind is totally obliterated.

Why couldn’t Thompson have simply said: “I still don’t know whether life begins at conception. But I’ve come to believe that it is not the place of government to decide which innocent humans [an important distinction for supporters of the death penalty] deserve the right to life and which do not. Government isn’t God and cannot play God.”