Books, Arts & Manners: Why Compromise?

Abortion: A Case Study in Law and Morals, by Fred M. Frohock Greenwood, 201 pp., $29.95 Under what circumstances is it appropriate to kill your child? That’s really the crux of the abortion debate. There is no doubt—legal, medical, or moral—about what defines a human being; even abortion advocates admit as much. The issue is: What external criteria may be used to justify killing human beings? Professor Frohock uses this line of argument to Scotch-tape over the cracks in the ten-year-old Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, which he admits was “a dubious attempt to find and extend various privacy values in the Constitution.” Professor Frohock suggests, instead, a defense of Roe that is framed in terms of sexual equality.

Just as racial integration was considered a sufficiently important affirmation of our vaunted constitutional principle of equality to justify the lives lost in race riots, so also sexual equality may be so obvious a constitutional imperative as to be extended to the woman whether or not the fetus has the right to life. In other words, Frohock argues, the right to equality takes precedence over the right to life.

Abortion: A Case Study in Law and Morals, by Fred M. Frohock Greenwood, 201 pp., $29.95 Under what circumstances is it appropriate to kill your child? That’s really the crux of the abortion debate. There is no doubt—legal, medical, or moral—about what defines a human being; even abortion advocates admit as much. The issue is: What external criteria may be used to justify killing human beings? Professor Frohock uses this line of argument to Scotch-tape over the cracks in the ten-year-old Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, which he admits was “a dubious attempt to find and extend various privacy values in the Constitution.” Professor Frohock suggests, instead, a defense of Roe that is framed in terms of sexual equality.

Just as racial integration was considered a sufficiently important affirmation of our vaunted constitutional principle of equality to justify the lives lost in race riots, so also sexual equality may be so obvious a constitutional imperative as to be extended to the woman whether or not the fetus has the right to life. In other words, Frohock argues, the right to equality takes precedence over the right to life.

About the Author

Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D’Souza is a writer, scholar, and public intellectual. He is the author of America: Imagine A World Without Her, in which he explores the landscape of a world in which America had lost the Revolutionary War.