How, in his ideal, would Paul handle women who have abortions? Would they face the death penalty, as in Williamson’s utopia, or something lesser but indefinite, as in Ponnuru’s? The majority of women who have abortions are already mothers. Would removing them from their other children serve a pro-life purpose, when so much of pro-life reasoning points toward the importance of the mother-child relationship? What of the children left behind: foster care, orphanages? And the mothers in prison, bastions of rape and abuse, what about their lives? Does it seem sane or restorative to put Purvi Patel in prison for some 20 years because she either had a miscarriage or an abortion? Anti-abortion, in other words, is not necessarily “pro-life.” This is why policy details matter.
Plenty of Americans identify as pro-life, as recent polling work by Vox has shown. But their position is complicated, and rightly dogged by questions of penalties and alternatives. Paul’s mistake is to presume that discussions of abortion penalties issue only from those who are pro-choice. There are plenty of reasons for a pro-life person, like myself, to refuse to support candidates or legislation that favor responses to abortion that are just as anti-life as the thing itself.
