If only it were so easy.

The American Spectator has good, incisive writing. It’s always timely and issue-oriented. Quin Hillyer has finally decided to confront abortion. Long overdue.

It’s what I’ve always shied away from: directly and
unambiguously addressing the issue of abortion itself, square on. I
learned long ago that it’s almost impossible to have a reasoned
conversation about abortion, because feelings are too strong and too
raw. So I just avoided it. Avoidance is so easy.

But not an option. Now more than ever.

After agonizing over his qualms about the subject, mostly
understandable but wrought in such a way that may give comfort to the
radical forces for abortion…..Hillyer gets more into his subject.

The United States has far too many laws. The law should
not be meant for little things. Law should not govern every human
interaction. Law should not replace human judgment in most matters of
everyday life.

But law is what society must rely on to govern the biggest issues,
the ones where clear lines must be drawn — the issues where society
must make choices because to abdicate those choices is to accept
anarchy and disorder so rampant that they hinder the freedom of
ordinary, innocent people. And the first duty of the law is to protect
the life and liberty of the innocent. Where somebody is blameless
before the law, he or she has the right to the law’s protection. It’s
that simple. Furthermore, no one person’s liberty can properly be
bought at the expense of an innocent’s life. Without life, there is no
liberty; in law, existence must precede essence, because without
existence the essence is meaningless.

The law exists to protect those who cannot protect themselves. And
the law must, always, err on the side of life. Lost liberty is
recoverable; lost life is not.

Now that he’s warmed up to the subject, he takes defense of the vulnerable seriously.

Law steps in to guard against defects of motives, of
knowledge, of certainty, and of human nature. To guard against those
defects, law must err, must always err, on the side of the most
innocent, the most vulnerable, the most voiceless. To err on any other
side is to risk an irreversible mistake. And law must err on the side
of innocent human life.

Here, he addresses the essentials, so marginalized by the media
style books that news consumer may be unsure about what constitutes the
human life that can easily be seen as innocent.

We know a “fetus” is a life form, and we know it is,
genetically, only human (not gorilla, not wombat, not cabbage). We
therefore should know that we have no choice, in a realm where certain
mysteries always will rein, other than to protect that human life which
is most vulnerable and innocent of all.

An odd and clumsy way of arriving at the point, but there nonetheless. Life of the species homo sapiens.

Among the awards given by the Susan B. Anthony List last
week was one given to young Lia Mills, a seventh grader from Toronto
who refused to consider any other topic for a speech contest other than
a plea, a well-reasoned plea, to stop abortions. “A person’s a person,
no matter how small,” she said, quoting the famous elephant Horton (who
heard a Who).

But that was just her rhetoric. Her reasoning — available on YouTube 
— went thusly: “We must remember that with our rights and our choices
come responsibilities, and we can’t take someone else’s rights away to
avoid our responsibilities.”

Out of the mouths of the young, wisdom.