President for life: what the election means for abortion and related issues.

IN the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court declared that "Africans"--that "unfortunate race"--had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." What Chief Justice Roger Taney said then about black people, John Kerry says today about human beings in the embryonic and fetal stages of development. According to Kerry, they have no rights which those who desire to destroy them--whether to escape unwanted pregnancies or to exploit them for scientific research--are bound to respect. George W. Bush's position is the polar opposite: The unborn should be respected as members of the human family and protected by law.

For pro-life Americans, the choice between Bush and Kerry could not be starker; nor could the timing of the election be more crucial. John Kerry's Dred Scott decision is Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that manufactured a virtually unlimited right to abortion. Kerry has vowed that as president he would exclude from eligibility for appointment to the Supreme Court any lawyer or judge, however superbly qualified, who would consider dismantling or even cutting back on the wholesale abortion license of Roe. Abortion must not only be preserved in law, it must be paid for by taxpayers--even those millions of taxpayers who, as a matter of conscience, judge abortion to be an unspeakable crime.

By contrast, President Bush not only will, but has, appointed to the federal bench constitutionalist judges who recognize that Roe was both a moral and a legal atrocity. He has sought to protect the unborn in the small number of ways permitted by Roe, and has blocked efforts to implicate taxpayers in abortions by funding them with federal dollars.

The lives of many nascent human beings hang in the balance of this presidential election. Indeed, the number of lives at stake goes far beyond those at risk of being destroyed by abortion--for the winner of the election will almost certainly settle, too, whether the federal government will fund the production of human beings by cloning to be deliberately killed in the embryonic stage for purposes of "harvesting" their cells and tissues for use in biomedical research. Kerry vigorously supports cloning human embryos for these purposes; Bush opposes all human cloning and embryo-killing.

Bush stepped into the Oval Office in January 2001 and promptly reinstated Ronald Reagan's "Mexico City" policy, which turned off the money spigot for international promoters of abortion. He supported and signed into law a ban on partial-birth abortion--a ban that Bill Clinton had twice vetoed. (The ban has been enjoined by judges citing Roe v. Wade.) President Bush signed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which protects the small number of children each year who survive abortions from being killed or abandoned to die once they exit the womb. He signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act--"Laci and Conner's Law"--to ensure that murderers of pregnant women are punished for the deaths of both mother and child.

Despite enormous pressure to cave on the question of funding embryo-destructive research, Bush has held firm against embryo-killing. He has demonstrated his willingness and ability to stand up in the face of a campaign that has featured the shameful hyping of embryonic-stem-cell research, and disingenuous claims from both Kerry and Edwards that he is blocking cures for horrible diseases for the sake of upholding "right-wing ideology."

Again, the contrast with Kerry is striking. In 1984, Kerry vowed to vote against "any restrictions on age, consent, funding restrictions, or any law to limit access to abortion." However much he has flip-flopped and vacillated on other issues, when it comes to protecting and funding abortion, he has been ruthlessly true to his word. Over 20 years in the Senate, Kerry has established himself as an unsurpassed champion of the abortion lobby. He voted against the partial-birth-abortion ban six times. His hostility to the idea of protecting prenatal life is so extreme that he even voted against the Unborn Victims of Violence ...