Frank words...

Check a couple of articles from Frank Beckwith on the topic of abortion. In Choice Words: A Critique of the New Pro-Life Rhetoric, from the Jan / Feb 2004 issue of Touchstone magazine,  he critiques a new pro-life strategy that attempts to argue for the pro-life position by framing the issue in terms of the best interests of the mother-to-be. He states:

I will argue that this new rhetorical strategy, or NRS, is flawed in at least three ways: (1) its supporters over-confidently interpret the public’s “moral” condemnation of abortion as consistent with objective morality and a pro-life view of the fetus; (2) it rests on a questionable interpretation of social science data; and (3) it may nurture and sustain the moral presuppositions that allow for abortion.

In What Would Reagan Do?: A consistent ethic on life, at NRO, he takes a look at the book Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, published by Reagan in 1984, and applies the principles Reagan followed to the current stem-cell debate. Frank states:

As Reagan understood, if one's value is conditioned on certain accidental properties, then the human equality affirmed by the Declaration and advanced by Lincoln — the philosophical foundation of our constitutional regime — is a fiction. In that case there is no principled basis for rejecting the notion that human rights ought to be distributed to individuals on the basis of native intellectual abilities or other value-giving properties, such as rationality or self-awareness. One can only reject this notion by affirming that human beings are intrinsically valuable because they possess a particular nature from the moment they come into existence. That is to say, what a human being is, and not what he does, makes her a subject of rights. But this would mean that, like slavery, the nation ought to discard the right to abortion, for it is as inconsistent with our fundamental principles as was slavery.

Also check an interesting blog post from Frank titled, Yahoo/Planned Parenthood T-Shirt Offer - No Joke. The following apparel was up for sale by Yahoo / Planned Parenthood, but has apparently been withdrawn.