Rick Santorum went on Meet the Press this morning and reiterated his extreme views on abortion. Specifically, he said that since, in his view, life begins at conception, the government should prosecute doctors who perform abortions even in cases of rape and incest. That seems logical if you accept his premise. But it also seems incomplete.
If a woman decides that she would like to see her husband dead and she hires a hit man to kill him, no country on Earth would prosecute the hit man and fail to prosecute the woman who hired him. They’re both guilty of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, etc.
Now, here’s what I find confusing. The only obvious reason to take a stand like Santorum’s, and to leave the woman’s culpability entirely out of the situation, is because you think your true position is politically untenable. In other words, you’re only willing to advocate your moral position as far as you think it can be taken and still leave you a politically viable candidate. Why else trim your sails?
But Santorum’s position is totally untenable even in the watered-down form in which he presents it.
Finally, let me add, once again, that any system that made providing an elective abortion a prosecutable crime would have to have a process for determining which abortions were elective and which were medically required. And, because the medical procedures used to treat early miscarriages are the same as the ones to provide abortions, any early miscarriage requiring medical treatment would have to be considered a potential crime scene. There is no way to craft a system that prosecutes doctors for performing abortions that doesn’t treat couples who’ve suffered a miscarriage as potential witnesses to murder who are obligated to cooperate in any police investigation.
When the Supreme Court introduced the concept of a “right to privacy” into the abortion debate, they were thinking about things like this.
There’s one nice thing about Santorum’s approach, though. By eliminating the “rape and incest exceptions” we wouldn’t need to investigate those crimes (in the context of abortion, anyway).
I’m not particularly interested in what Rick Santorum has to say, but I just think it’s weird that he draws the lines where he does. Maybe he thinks he has a real chance to be president.
