Update: Ramesh points us to his own explanations of why it's reasonable to favor abortion restrictions without wanting to throw women in jail.
They are here, here and here (already cited below).
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There's been an interesting back and forth over at Mirror of Justice that was sparked by this Jonathan Rauch review of Ramesh Ponnuru's Party of Death.
Rick Garnett starts here
Eduardo Penalver replies
Back to Garnett
Garnett also quotes a bit of Ponnuru's own refutation of the Rauch/Penalver critique (the piece he quotes can be foud here.)
More Penalver
One last bit from Garnett
The critique in Rauch's review that fails to impress Garnett but which finds support from Penalver is this:
He believes that discarding or destroying embryos should be forbidden, but should it be punishable as first-degree murder? If not, why not? If an embryo is morally indistinguishable from a newborn, then killing it is surely a heinous crime. If human life is “inviolable,” then why should it matter whether a hopelessly vegetative patient — someone like Terri Schiavo — left instructions not to be fed? Surely, from Ponnuru’s perspective, the doctors caring for her cannot ethically conspire to starve her to death even if she would prefer to die. If every abortion is infanticide, could even the most life-threatening pregnancy be ended? We don’t have a “health exception” to the murder laws.
This argument is being increasingly used against pro-lifers, especially since the release of Ponnuru's book. As pro-lifers succeed in making it more and more clear that abortion is an unjust killing, abortion supporters shift the debate and accuse them of not having the courage of their convictions. Rauch, indeed, does not express much disagreement with Ponnuru's arguments in Party of Death. If abortion is murder, then why not the death penalty for mothers who abort? Since pro-lifers don't generally support any criminal sanctions for these women, then they must not really believe that abortion is murder, or else there is some other inconsistency that makes pro-lifers wrong. Whatever the answer is, pro-lifers are wrong, wrong, wrong.
