Jody Bottum Responds to Jeffrey Hart

A thought worth pondering here as we approach yet-another anniversary of Roe v. Wade:

Indeed, were opposition to abortion primarily a political sentiment, it would look like this: If you are not moved to apocalyptic imagination by the abortion slaughter—if you do not feel, in some deep place, that a fire is kindled by those children’s deaths, which shall burn unto the lowest hell and consume the earth with its increase—then you are not serious in the pro-life cause. If you have not weighed all means for attempting to halt these murders, including forms of civil disobedience that could damage the nation, then you are not honest in your rejection of abortion. If the Constitution forever guarantees the killing of unborn children, as the Supreme Court claimed, then we live under a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.

This is Jody Bottum’s response to Jeffrey Hart’s argument in the Wall Street Journal that being pro-life just isn’t, well, realistic. So, hey, why bother:

. . .most conservatives defend the “right to life,” even of a single-cell embryo, and call for a total ban on abortion. To put it flatly, this is not going to happen. Too many powerful social forces are aligned against it, and it is therefore a utopian notion. . . .Simply to pull an abstract “right to life” out of the Declaration of Independence is not conservative but Jacobinical.

via Augustine at Red State.