GOP Must Hold to Its Principles

On the issue of whether the Republican Party should condone or condemn legalized abortion, Dana Parsons notes that “you don’t win elections by shrinking your base” (‘Billing Abortion as Murder Could Annihilate GOP Base,” column, May 2).

Republicans who oppose abortion, we’re given to understand, would be wise to shut up about it and go along with whatever policies will win elections. Such people are, after all, just “a group of religious ideologues,” according to Anita Mangels, the co-chair of the Orange County chapter of the California Abortion Rights Action League.

She notes further that society has come to consider a “living person”--that is, one whose termination must legally be considered murder--as one existing outside the womb. But what if the opinions of the law and society happen to be wrong? They have been before--think of the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, Nazi Germany. Think of this country’s once-legal treatment of Native Americans and blacks.

In this century, a southern state legislature tried to pass a law that pi be rounded off to exactly 3 to save trouble for engineers. The problem is that the difference between “a human being” and “not a human being,” whatever that difference may prove to be, is as fundamentally real as pi. It’s not arbitrary and dependent upon our consensus. I’m sure that even Mangels would, despite what she says, admit that a fetus two days short of delivery is an entity entitled to the protections of the Bill of Rights and that as the chronology of the pregnancy is traced back toward the moment of conception, the distinction between “human being” and “not a human being” eventually becomes impossible to discern.

There is a broad range within which a fetus might be a human, or might not. At the very least, society and law are inconsistent in dealing with this particular area of uncertainty.

One doesn’t have to be a “religious ideologue” to see that abortion is just as perilous; and one would need a somewhat different phrase than “all good Republicans” to describe people who would dismiss this issue simply in the hope of winning elections.

TIM POWERS

Santa Ana