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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: May 9, 2006 at 10:38 pm by Eve Tushnet

2006-05-09T22:38:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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YOU’RE NOBODY ‘TIL SOMEBODY LOVES YOU: Review of Ramesh Ponnuru’s Party of Death. Really scattershot… sorry.

1. It really is an excellent resource. I don’t know of any better source on the current state of American politics surrounding abortion, embryo-destructive research, and euthanasia. I’m pretty clued-in on these things, I think, and I still learned a lot from several chapters, most notably the last half of “Is Abortion Good for You?” (on maternal deaths before and after Roe), “The Corruption of History,” and the section on euthanasia in the Netherlands.

2. If you want to show someone what the issues really are, and what the stakes are–I’d xerox Ponnuru’s chapter “The Politics of Personhood” and the chapter “Abortion and the Children of Choice” from Maggie Gallagher’s Enemies of Eros. Between the two of them they strip away all the comforting illusions that we can make up our minds about abortion based on what we believe about sex, or women, or anything other than what you have to do to earn human rights.

3. This is a first-step book. I think that is one of the things frustrating critics from the pro-life left. Ponnuru does address arguments that roughly-left policies do better at reducing abortion rates than roughly-right ones; but that’s really not the focus of his book, and he doesn’t attempt, I think, to seal that deal completely. Think of it this way: If one person, or party, said that child abuse was a protected right of parents, and the alternative person or party said that it was not–would you really vote for the okay-with-abuse party because it supported birth control, or Medicaid expansion, or some other thing you thought might, maybe, reduce child abuse? Maybe you would; if you are 100% convinced that Medicaid expansion would reduce child abuse more than banning and/or condemning child abuse, you’re taking a weird but maybe defensible position. But I think Ponnuru is mainly trying to move us to the point where we see abortion in these terms.

4. I’m not convinced that “death” is really the issue here. If it were, the book would have to address war and execution. (Ponnuru and I both oppose the latter but not necessarily the former.) It really is about what grounds our human rights. Is it just being a human individual, or do we have to demonstrate and/or maintain some cool ability? (…I guess I’m lucky that I always did well on standardized tests.)

5. A bunch of people have criticized the title and/or cover copy. And I agree with them. I know Ramesh defends the title (though not all aspects of the book’s packaging), and yeah, it’s derived from a “pro-choice” philosopher, et cetera; but it still seems like a classic case of narrowing your audience and handing people an excuse not to read your book. Why do that?

The one reason I can think of is that Ramesh is trying to rip through some of the comforting myths that have kept pro-lifers voting for “pro-choice” Democratic candidates. He’s basically rubbing their noses in their lack of influence in their own party, and saying, Look, you guys are really honorable, but this is a hostile field for you, and you should at the very least consider the possibility that you’re being played.

I think they are being played. Then, though, I also think a lot of people concerned with jus in bello got played (…let ourselves get played) by the GOP. And so I am really sympathetic to pro-life Democrats who basically respond to the more partisan sections of Ramesh’s book with, “OK, and your solution is…?”

6. But this is not a book about solutions, at all. That’s disconcerting. There’s virtually nothing about crisis pregnancy centers, nor about possible post-Roe legal regimes. Again, I do think this book needs to be understood as a first-step book, and in that role it does really well. It shouldn’t be dismissed for failing to find a fail-safe solution to the problem of the devaluation of the helpless human individual, you know? Still… this book is pretty much only about what’s wrong, not about how to fix it. On those terms, it’s great, no kidding. But given that I do think it’s an unusually comprehensive and unusually intelligible discussion of what are often called the “life issues”–I kind of wish it had given me more ideas of what to do.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers Online.
Not Dead Yet.
Be Not Afraid.

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