MM’s most recent post led me to come up with an interesting thought experiment (some iterations of which I believe have been proposed before by some of our commentators). Let’s say the Democrats proposed a single-payer system that completely ended private insurance. Let’s say that Bart Stupak and Ben Nelson attached an amendment to this proposal that would ban the single payer from covering any form of abortion (including the morning-after pill) for any reason. This would, of course, put an end to both private and public coverage of abortion. Would pro-life Republican Senators and representatives be obligated to vote for the bill regardless of other qualms they might have about the merits of the single payer system? If not (i.e. if it would be legitimate for them to vote against the bill in order to avoid “socialism” despite the objective good that it would do in ending any public and corporate funding of abortion), then how do groups like Priests for Life and ALL justify the claim that a pro-life voter may not vote against a pro-life candidate for any reason? It gets more interesting if we point out that the average voter’s proximity to the evil of abortion (regardless of who they end up voting for) is far more remote than the average politician’s.
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