The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life -- By Ramesh Ponnuru (Book Review).(Book review)

For those who don't follow the daily oscillations of the abortion debate, Ramesh Ponnuru may not be a familiar name. Those of us who do know him as the extaordinarily thoughtful pro-life senior editor of National Review.

Wise to the way of abortion politics, it came as no surprise to his admirers that barely had the ink dried on The Party of Death than his book came under an ugly online attack for various and sundry alleged defects. For those who'd actually bothered to read the book (as oppose to cribbing talking points from pro-abortionist web sites), the irony was hard to miss.

One of the book's primary strengths is its meticulous explication of how for over 33 years the public has responded not to the real Roe v. Wade decision, but to a fabrication stitched together by the Courts, much of the media and academia, and the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. Likewise, the attack on his book was less (if at all) the response of a careful reading of his thesis than it was a push-the-panic-button preemptive strike launched to bury Ponnuru's unassailable conclusion that the Democratic Party has become "the chief political vehicle for the idea that inviolability of human life is outdated."

In 20 elegantly written chapters, Ponnuru covers a massive amount of territory. Because so much attention has and will be rightly paid to the political implications of his book, it's useful first to discuss the broader context in which he places his analysis of how one of our two major parties has become an almost wholly owned subsidiary of what Pope John Paul II called the "culture of death."

(Parenthetically, Ponnuru correctly argues that the case against the Party of Death can be made independently of religion-based arguments. Pope John Paul's name does not appear, for example.

(And by making his case in these terms Ponnuru provides his readers with commonly accessible language for dialoguing with those who differ over abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and destructive stem cell research. Ponnuru quotes George McKenna, who argues that what unites pro-lifers is not a religious doctrine but " a law written in their hearts telling them that we may not kill people just because their birth will be inconvenient or their death will be greeted with relief.")

Ponnuru brilliantly outlines the trajectory of the culture of death that so logically follows from its initial lethal error.