President Bush’s stem cell decision has elicited an onslaught of commentary, the most edifying of which is that of George Will, conservative columnist for the Washington Post. In a splendid column Will placed the decision into a broader moral and political context-a context that should be contemplated by concerned citizens.

“It is now clearer than ever,” wrote Will on Aug. 14th, “that America’s two parties represent a cultural cleavage much deeper and more dramatic than the traditional, indeed banal, party divisions about taxes and spending and the like.. The parties represent. different stances toward nature, including human nature.”

And how. On every crucial issue (the environment, capital punishment, homosexuality, and so on) the disagreement between conservatives and liberals is large and growing larger. And nowhere is this fact more emphatic, or more worrisome, than with the country’s most important issue: abortion.

The abortion issue is the most important because it best reflects America’s moral health. According to Roe v. Wade, a fetus has only “the potential” for life. It has the moral status of a hamburger in a woman’s stomach. How’s that for moral health?

These days many people are disinclined to discuss abortion because the topic does scant more than inflame tempers. In airplanes, at dinners, in classrooms, most conversation that touches the issue is qualified by: “Now, I don’t want to get into a debate over whether abortion is right or not; I only..” Such hesitation is understandable. And the problem encompasses more-far more-than convincing a few friends and colleagues.

Pro-abortion forces assure us that the right to kill an unborn baby is a perfectly acceptable outcome of, among other things, this: “.with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

To understand how Thomas Jefferson’s statement has been traduced to accommodate abortion, read Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.

Of the Declaration of Independence, Bork writes that its lofty phrases were “entirely appropriate for the purpose of rallying the colonists and justifying their rebellion to the world.” But “if taken, as they commonly are, as a guide to action, governmental or private,” they “may be pernicious.”

The value that pro-abortionists, aided by the Supreme Court, have taken as their guide to action is liberty. Americans have been told they have a God-given right to liberty, which for some means that just as people may choose chocolate over vanilla, some women may choose to demolish the consequence (a consequence with a beating heart) of sex.

Is this what the Founders had in mind?

Bork: “The signers of the Declaration took the moral order they had inherited for granted. It never occurred to them that the document’s rhetorical flourishes might be dangerous if that moral order weakened.”

The moral order has indeed weakened, and its weakening is closing consciences to an issue as morally pressing as slavery was in the 1800s.

Perhaps that parallel seems thin. But that is only because the gruesomeness of abortion is concealed. Unlike the sight of manacled black men and women, laboring and bleeding, the most vivid imagery of abortion is a woman entering a clinic, flanked by protesters. An abortion appears clean, medical, benign.

But of course it is not. And how clean, how medical, how benign is partial-birth abortion, in which the baby’s body, up to its neck, is pulled from the mother so that a doctor may stick in a vacuum to suck the brains out of the baby?

George W. Bush has often said, “Good people can disagree about abortion.” True. Good people can. But there were good people who had slaves and believed that slave trade was as ethically heartbreaking as exchanging wheat for barley. Consider the would-be consequences if abolitionists had stayed silent.

The Green Party, both a symptom and a cause of the pro-abortion movement, in its 2000 platform had this reflection: “When we see the first picture ever taken of our green oasis from space, photographed from the window of the Apollo flight, we marvel at the preciousness of life.”

That is, except the preciousness of . . . well, you know the exception.

Matt Emerson is a sophomore studying political science and philosophy.