This is one of the best take-downs of Ramesh Ponnuru’s book The Party Of Death that I have read. Here’s a snippet:
In the seventh chapter of his new book, The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life, Ramesh Ponnuru draws a distinction:
There is a radical difference that separates both an adult human being and a human embryo from a kitten and a sperm cell. The first two are complete, living human organisms and the second two are not. Yet the party of death ignores that basic difference while making a difference of degree — the adult’s greater age and development of his capacities — the basis of a radical difference in treatment. To draw distinctions in this way is to violate the most basic canons of justice.
I think that killing the kitten would be worse than killing the embryo. If you agree, dear reader, you stand beside me in the party of death. We don’t think the lives of all human organisms have equal value. For my part, I hold that moral status depends on the nature of a creature’s mind. This means that the lives of creatures that can think and feel — regardless of their species — are of greater value than the lives of creatures that cannot.
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According to liberals and other ordinary people, the moral status of something depends on what mental capacities it has. Do as you please with a baseball — it has no mind, and thus no moral status. It’s wrong, however, to beat a dog, because he can feel pain. But since dogs lack the understanding to participate in politics, they have no right to vote. Young humans can’t vote until they’ve reached an age where we can expect mental qualities like maturity, rationality, and political awareness from them. Then they achieve a moral status such that denying them the vote, and many other rights, would be an injustice.
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[W]e often base rights on continuously variable mental qualities. Two-year-olds don’t have the right to vote because they lack the required rationality, maturity, and political awareness. All of these mental qualities increase on a continuous scale. Testing everyone for these qualities before letting them vote is impractical and open to abuse, so we let people vote when their age allows us to assume that they have these qualities. Determining the beginning of the right to life may be weightier than determining the beginning of the right to vote, but there’s no obvious reason to do it in a radically different way. Birth provides a clear and natural line for the inception of a right to life. It also fits into our general scheme of rights nicely, marking the point when any fetal right to life and a woman’s privacy rights over her body are disentangled. (I’m always baffled by the conservative claim — echoed by Ponnuru — that a woman’s privacy rights aren’t violated when the government forces her to continue growing a fetus inside her uterus. In comparison, the privacy rights a person has over what happens in his home seem trivial and derivative.)