From Roe to woe

It’s a rare treat to be present when a shudder passes through the zeitgeist, and this feels like one of those moments. What I refer to is a sense – suddenly everywhere in the rightside blogosphere - that the tacit assent to the notion of a pregnant woman’s right to an abortion, which has held sway for at least two decades, has quietly evaporated, almost without anyone noticing. See Currency Lad and Michelle Malkin on the subject.

In the noble pantheon of human rights, it suddenly seems difficult to make a ringing Jeffersonian endorsement of what Ann Coulter has summarized as the right of a woman to have unprotected sex with a man whose children she doesn’t want to bear. As fundamental freedoms go, I somehow can’t see Norman Rockwell doing a painting about this one.