Without exceptions

It's important to remember that if the McCain ticket prevails, we'll be a "heartbeat away" from having a president whose core principle -- about the only issue she probably really cares about -- is the antithesis of what the vast majority of Americans believe.

So at the risk of occasioning yet another “heartbeat away” reference, it seems important to keep pointing out that the Republicans appear to have placed a genuine true believer on the presidential ticket. Palin has gone wobbly in a couple of recent interviews, placing extra emphasis on “personally,” as in, “personally, I would counsel the person to choose life, despite horrific, horrific circumstances that this person would find themselves in” — that’s from the Katie Couric interviews, as Couric pressed Palin on whether abortion should be illegal for a pregnant 15-year-old who was raped by her father. Palin won’t yield, though. That is what she believes. Abortion opposition at its most coherent is apparently central to Palin’s belief system, in fact: if a fetus is genuinely a child from the instant of conception, then the law can’t permit killing it for any reason except the extraordinary circumstance of an emergency to save a woman’s life (and in some right-to-life circles there’s argument about that, too, or whether equal measures should be taken to save woman and unborn alike).

In the trenches this distinguishes Palin not only from McCain and George W. Bush but also from a long list of other politicians, many Republican and some Democratic, whose records make them look anti-abortion while their hearts don’t seem to be in it. If that makes Palin “extreme,” according to the view from the trenches, fine — about time a pro-life candidate stood up and made it clear that keeping any abortions legal blows up the central right-to-life premise. If you take the Bush/McCain position — abortion should be illegal but with exceptions for rape and incest pregnancies — then you’re saying the fetus is not a child if the woman was forced into sex, but is a child if she participated voluntarily. That doesn’t actually make any sense, which is why for 35 years now this country’s most dedicated abortion opponents have been essentially holding their noses as they accept as allies the rape-and-incest-exception people, the restrict-but-don’t-prohibit people, the overturn-Roe-and-let-the-states-decide people. In the midst of all that moral compromise, Palin appears to have backbone. “She just is sincere,” says Colleen Parro, the Republican National Coalition for Life co-founder, whose idea it was to make Palin this year’s guest of honor. “She isn’t someone who just wants to regulate it or restrict it or fool around with it.”

Of course, "she's the direct counterpoint to the liberal feminist agenda."