“The occasion for serious soul-searching among conservative pro-lifers”

Ross Douthat, reflecting on the loneliness of pro-life Democrats like Rep. Bart Stupak:

There’s been a lot of talk on the right about how his eleventh-hour surrender marks “the death of the pro-life Democrat.” But that possibility should be the occasion for serious soul-searching among conservative pro-lifers, rather than just satisfaction about having been right about the Democratic Party all along. After all, there are still pro-life Democrats for a reason: Because many abortion opponents can’t reconcile their views on social justice with the harder-edged, “any redistribution equals socialism” tendencies in the Republican Party. Some of these pro-lifers are older Catholic Democrats like Stupak; some of them are younger Americans who are hostile to abortion but don’t vote on the issue because they can’t imagine themselves being represented by the party of Limbaugh and Beck. A successful pro-life politics desperately needs these constituencies to find representation — and if there’s no place for anti-abortion sentiment among the Democrats, then pro-lifers need the Republican Party to feel hospitable to voters whose impulses on social policy tend in a more communitarian direction.

Mind you, I still think Kathleen Parker got it right: "The man tried to be a hero for the unborn, and then, when all the power of the moment was in his frail human hands, he dropped the baby." But Douthat warns that those of us who are driven by pro-life convictions had better broaden the ideological tent or see more defeats to come. "Pro-life" is not a synonym for "fiscal conservative."