Cooke's Tour

Jim Dine, Late Friends, 2012, via Pace Gallery. All illustrations from ArtObserved, March 2013.

Charles C.W. Cooke (Christoph Willibald?), the latest and most convincing Evelyn Waugh imitator to be recruited by the National Review (true, he sounds less like Waugh himself than Lord Sebastian Flyte imitating Waugh, but that's much closer than Mark Steyn has ever gotten, and besides old Mr. Buckley would have been a bit suspicious of Steyn for being, um, [jump]
having a foreign-sounding or cosmopolitan name, wouldn't he?), is being mocked up and down the Upper Left Side for the following paragraph on the subject of Ariel Castro, who is threatened with a murder indictment, as Ohio law permits, for having given one of his kidnaping victims abortions by the method of punching her in the stomach until she miscarried:

Yet abortion is legal in Ohio, as everywhere else in the United States. This means that if you kill an unborn child in Ohio with the mother’s permission, it’s okay; if you do it without her permission, it’s murder. The unborn child, therefore, is only a life if the mother says it is a life. That makes no logical sense at all. It is the logic of slavery, not of individual liberty. Who will defend it?

Cooke is, however, pointing to something that really is crazy and deserves discussion. It seems that Ohio is one of those states where the Life-Begins-at-Conception movement rewrote the aggravated murder statutes to include fetuses:

No person shall purposely, and with prior calculation and design, cause the death of another or the unlawful termination of another's pregnancy.

And thus, although lawful abortion is, as Cooke notes, lawful, unlawful abortion is not merely illegal but a capital crime. So Castro could literally be put on Death Row for doing something that in other circumstances he couldn't even be arrested for. According to the Guardian, he'd be the first, and I can't say I'm surprised, since these laws were clearly written not to be obeyed but to demonstrate how fearlessly anti-abortion the state legislatures were. Which is of course a good example of why laws ought not to be written in this spirit.

Aki Sasamoto's installation Talking in Circles Talking, 2013, Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn.

But in trying to find his way through this thicket of confusion and maintain his anti-abortion faith at the same time, Charles Casimir Wenceslas lands on exactly the spot that could have brought him some philosophical clarity:

The unborn child... is only a life if the mother says it is a life.

That is precisely correct, and I don't know if anybody has ever put it so well (I know I haven't). Being a human life is not a purely physiological fact about some tissue, but is what we fancy-pants describe as "socially constructed"; that is, it grows out of the way a woman interacts with some tissue growing in her womb. If she regards it with delight, makes up names for it, sings to it, and in time comes to love being kicked from the inside, that is the normal process of ensoulment that we would wish every pregnancy to be. If she regards it with dread as a nightmare tumor that will wreck her hopes of a happy life, then she needs—needs—an abortion. Admittedly, if she doesn't have an abortion it will come to term and come out a human life anyway, too late to be terminated, but that doesn't change the argument. This is why in deciding whether an abortion is morally right or wrong only the views of the pregnant woman (and her physician, if she trusts the physician) should be considered.

In this sense what Castro did to Michelle Knight, punching her until she miscarried, and what he did to Amanda Berry when he

also forced Knight to deliver Berry’s baby in a plastic kiddie pool and threatened to murder Knight if the newborn died

are morally pretty much the same thing: they are not crimes committed against a lump of tissue but against social persons, women, in taking away their control of their bodies, in deciding who should have a baby and who should not and enforcing his decision with violence (maybe Knight didn't want to have hers, but she surely didn't want her pregnancies to be ended in that way). This is the logic of individual liberty, Cookie, not of slavery—it's just not so easy for a conservative to recognize as such, since conservatives tend to recognize the liberty only of men with money—and I for one will defend it as hard as I can.

Song Dong, Doing Nothing Mountains 2011-12, via Pace Gallery.