Pro-Life Democrats

Nice WSJ piece. Did you know that:

According to a Zogby poll taken last month, 47% of Democrats oppose abortion except in the case of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother. Only 20% say abortion should be legal for any reason at any time during a pregnancy. To paraphrase a button being handed out at the pro-lifers' party this week: 47% of Democrats can't be wrong.

That's less pro-life than me, but about as pro-life as Dubya. And yet the party leadership sticks to the dogmatic position that any restriction on the right to chose abortion, any way, any time, is anathema. What gives?

And yes, the GOP has the opposite problem - lots of pro-choice voters, but an almost exclusively pro-life (to some extent) national leadership. That's part of what's so queer about the issue: after about a decade in flux, the parties settled into ossified positions on the issue in the early 1980s, but no one seems to have bothered to tell that to the legions of pro-life Catholic Democrats and pro-choice mainline Protestant Republicans. I've come to think the opposite state of affairs, in which the Republicans are the pro-choice party and the Democrats the pro-life one, would probably be more natural, for reasons I won't discuss here, since I'd have to discuss them at length.

In other news...