Larison's point is well taken here, but he's making the assumption that there is a strong Christian case to be made for his pro-life views. I am not entirely sure that's true.
I'm not saying that the views of pro-life Christians are in any way invalid. How would I know? What I am saying is that, having read my Bible pretty thoroughly, I never found any reference to abortion in the Good Book. Not only does Jesus not mention it, but neither does anyone else in the book. A lot of Christians these days make the claim that abortion is the greatest moral evil in today's society. I understand this view, and if one believes that life begins at conception then the logic makes sense. But nothing in the Bible actually says life begins at conception. The Bible does espouse something like an absolute pro-life stance in which every life is important and valued. Pro-lifers will make this claim to tie their views to their religion, but one could just as easily say that they are also pro-life, but that they believe that life begins at viability or some such. Pro-lifers would no doubt scoff at such logic, but since the Bible does not provide an operative metric for when life actually begins it becomes a matter of opinion.
None of this is to say that one side or the other is correct on this issue. I have my opinion, and other people have others. But I don't see abortion as a religious issue, per se, so much as a moral and philosophical issue. And I do believe that being "pro-life" in any sense is incompatible with a belief in capital punishment. If one believes that it prevents crime (without evidence!), one is engaging in a utilitarian argument rather than a deontological one, in which lives can be sacrificed for the good of the many. Not so much "every life is sacred" sentiment there. And while I don't believe a person has to be a complete pacifist to be regarded as pro-life I do believe that support of the Iraq War is difficult to square with any sort of pro-life value structure. If the watchword of the pro-life movement is that every life is sacred, then continued support for the war after it became clear that WMDs weren't there is not compatible with the broader principle of the sanctity of life. As the Iraq War morphed from "a war to make us safer" into "a war to make everyone free" into "a war we're fighting because Bush can't admit a mistake", pro-lifers said nothing. In the meantime, they still raged against the evil of abortion while fully grown people died every day so as to allow George Bush not to face the disaster he wrought.
I do consider Larison to be legitimately pro-life, but I find him to be the exception in conservatism today.
