I should say that I take no pleasure in noting that the pro-life Democratic caucus is crawling toward extinction. No matter how inadequate or compromised conservatives might think pro-life Democrats are, the truth is that if you really care about eradicating the scourge of abortion they’re absolutely necessary. Because without them, the argument about abortion switches modes from moral persuasion to pure partisanship. And because the latter is so devoid of reason, it’s much harder to win converts.

All of which is to say that I have a great deal of natural sympathy and affinity for Bart Stupak.

Yet at the same time, I think we can fairly lay a great deal of responsibility for the polarization and acrimony of the last four years at his feet.

Our political order is based around what voters believe to be a kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for our elected officials. At the top of the pyramid are high-minded hopes about wisdom and judgment. But at the base of the pyramid–the foundation for our relationship with our officials–is that we trust them to be self-interested. That is to say, we trust them not to deliberately do something so abhorrent to us that they know for a certainty it will cost them their jobs.

I would argue that the passage of Obamacare damaged the political order because it broke this basic compact. And I don’t particularly blame President Obama or Nancy Pelosi. Sure, they drove the process. But that’s what their constituencies wanted from them. The engine governor for such radical change has always been guys like Stupak, who wouldn’t go along with it because they knew they couldn’t get away with it.

But Stupak didn’t keep up his end of the bargain. He violated basically every tier of the politician’s Maslow hierarchy: He didn’t believe in Obamacare, he didn’t like Obamacare, and he knew that voting for it would cost him his job because his constituents hated it. But he did it anyway because pure partisanship overrode every other concern. That’s not supposed to happen.

I’m sure Bart Stupak is a kind and gentle soul. But he failed as an elected official, with terrible consequences for the body politic. He abandoned even the old pro-life Democratic line, which may have hardened the fight over abortion into political amber. And his failures are not merely personal. They are a national tragedy.

Was that ugly, or what? I’ve been trying to think of a worse debate moment and the only thing that comes close is Bentsen-Quayle. There’s no telling what structural damage it inflicted, but my guess would be more rather than less.

That said, the entire episode is instructive of how unpredictable electoral politics can be. A few thoughts:

(1) There were plenty of Perry skeptics from the beginning. (I was not one of them.) But it turned out that none of the weaknesses they noticed actually hurt him. Remember, the argument against Perry was that he was prone to shooting from the hip; too bible-thumpin’ conservative; and would remind voters too much of W.

But what really damaged Perry was (a) He was too liberal on immigration; and (b) He had two debate moments (his attempted flip-flop attack on Romney and the Lost Third Agency) in which he looked old and doddering and lost.

The other thing that hurt Perry is that he emerged prepared to counter attacks from Romney, but was totally blind-sided when Santorum, Paul, Bachmann, et al took after him like he was a spliced hybrid of Nelson Rockefeller and Saul Alinsky. (This was not an unreasonable assumption on his part, since this group had given Romney a pass for several months.)

(2) Debates have never played as important a role in the primaries as they have this cycle. It’s unclear whether this is an aberration or a new reality. But try to remember a single moment from any primary debates since 1999. The only thing I come up with is “You’re likable enough, Hillary.” The gang-tackle of Perry in his early debates clearly crippled his candidacy–I’d argue more so than his one-on-one jousts with Romney.

(3) Is it fair that Herman Cain gets to say that China doesn’t have nuclear weapons and that he’s for-and-against abortion and that he’d trade hostages with terrorists, but that Perry doesn’t get to have a couple of brain blanks? Nope.

But fair’s got nothing to do with it.

(4) Unless the conversation changes between now and the convention, it would seem that immigration has replaced abortion as the key ideological litmus test in the Republican party. Now, maybe that’s just a function of the candidates needing a club to beat Perry with and immigration being the best-available weapon. But maybe it’s a more foundational shift. If the latter is the case, then this is a real tragedy for conservatism. A few reasons:

* Illegal immigration causes very real problems, but those problems tend to be economic. (Though some of them certainly have a cultural aspect.) Economic problems can be fixed more easily than cultural problems.

* The argument over abortion is–at least to pro-abortion forces–about a lot more than just the killing of babies. It’s about an absolute, iron-clad right to consequence-free sex. Which is, if you think about it, probably the single biggest legacy of the 1960s. If the left holds to anything at all, it’s that sex must never have negative consequences–no unwanted pregnancies, no diseases, no moral disapproval from third parties. That’s why the AIDS campaign was such a vital left-wing cause in the ’80s and ’90s. It’s the root of liberal support for same-sex marriage. It’s behind the idiotic claims that “love can never be wrong.”

All of this is why the only liberal cause Bill Clinton wasn’t willing to sell out for political gain was abortion. He vetoed the partial-birth ban at some real cost. But ingrained in liberal boomers is that this first principle is the cornerstone for the entire structure of sexual “freedom.” Admit that abortion (even in some cases) is wrong and you undermine a continent-sized chunk of liberal ideology and a huge portion of what has become our dominant cultural mores.

* For a host of complicated reasons (I go into this at some length in the book), illegal immigration is likely to significantly decrease in America during the next 20 years–no matter what policies we pursue. (Short version: As fertility rates go sub-replacement, a country’s outmigration dries up, as it has, for example, with Puerto Rico. Nearly all of Central and South America will be sub-replacement within 20 years.)

So debates over, say, building a fence or giving in-state tuition to illegals are more about ideological purity than actual consequence. Unlike abortion, where 50 million lives have been taken since 1973, with no end in sight.

Turns out, Mara Hvistendahl is anti-choice. Sort of:

In his review of my book, Last contended the work is “aimed, like a heat-seeking missile, against the entire intellectual framework of ‘choice.'” It is true that I don’t believe absolute choice is a great framing point for the politics of modern reproduction. The range of options available to parents today is simply too great. The rhetoric surrounding abortion in the United States sorely needs to be updated.

The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer attacks Ross Douthat’s review of Mara Hvistendahl’s Unnatural Selection. In the course of his attack, Serwer claims,

* If “women’s empowerment” lead to sex-selective abortion, that would offer a powerful argument against abortion since everyone agrees sex-selective abortion is bad. The problem is that even abortion rights supporters think sex-selective abortion is bad . . .

* Perhaps it seems obvious, but that kind of blatant economic incentive against having female children doesn’t exist in the United States.

And then:

* . . . female children being aborted because they’re by definition a financial liability actually suggests that “patriarchy” is a pretty huge part of the story. Rather than “female empowerment” being the issue, the problem is that women are literally valued less than men, a problem denying women the right to decide when to carry children to term wouldn’t actually solve.

Serwer should read Hvistendahl’s book more carefully. If he did, he’d see that “everyone” does not think that sex selective abortion is bad. But more importantly, he’d see that even in America, where girls are not an out-sized financial drain on families, the sex ratios at birth are skewed for some ethnicities–and become more skewed at higher-order births.

Finally, Sewer seems to have misunderstood the origins of sex-selective abortion: It begins not with lower- and middle-class families, who need to worry about girls being a financial drain, but rather with wealthy elites, for whom finances are a much lower-order concern. The behavior then filters down the socio-economic ladder to the middle and lower classes, which do have to worry about money. Hvistendahl makes this all quite clear in her reporting.

Also, the problem isn’t just that girls have a “lower” value to these poorer families. As Hvistendahl shows, the sex imbalance also causes havoc once the shortage of girls gives young women a higher value. When the “value” of young women escalates, it causes all sorts of other problems, including forced marriages, mail-order-weddings, widespread sexual slavery and prostitution, and the danger of creating a permanent underclass of women. In other words, the women’s enhanced value becomes a danger to her, not an asset.

But maybe none of this matters to abortion supporters, for whom the only imperative is the unfettered abortion right.

Let’s pretend for a moment that the only source of the problem really is patriarchy. Well, then, you have two choices: Do you confront the slaughter of millions of girls by “fighting” patriarchical culture in some nebulous way that may, or may not, after several decades, pay off? Or do you outlaw abortion, enforce the ban pretty rigorously (by sending doctors who perform them to jail) and understand that while there will still be illegal abortions which slip through the cracks, girl babies won’t be targeted as widely and that the vast majority of those who would have been killed in the gendercide will be allowed life?

I think I can guess where Serwer would come down. Which is fine. But you must then realize that all the posturing about how terrible it is that girls keep getting aborted is really just a second-order concern. Again, that’s fine. But if that’s what you believe, you should have the courage to say it out loud.

The best email I got after I reviewed Hvistendahl’s book was from someone who quipped that we’ll start restricting abortion in America the day after someone develops and in utero test for “the gay gene.” Because if it turned out that certain classes of women were aborting babies exclusively because of their homosexuality, then the left would finally turn on abortion.

And maybe they would. But maybe not.

P.S.: There’s also this. I actually wonder how closely Serwer read Hvistendahl’s book.

P.P.S.: In case my first point isn’t clear, I’d point readers to page 243 of Unnatural Selection, where Hvistendahl talks with an abortion-rights advocate who tried to put on a conference to talk about sex-selective abortion. She writes:

“People had really mixed feelings about sex selection,” she recalls. Many of the activists at the session didn’t believe it was unequivocally wrong. Some believed sex selection was wrong only when it discriminated against girls; selecting for girls was another matter.

There’s more where that came from. Like this line from a paper in Reproductive Health Matters (on page 27):

“For women attempting to have a son and experiencing pressure to fulfill their ‘womanly duty’ by having a male child, sex-selective abortion can be extremely empowering.”

Etc. But you really should read the book. It’s great.

Final Update: Adam Serwer has responded! Let me help him out: My point was not that I “want ‘womens’ empowerment'” to be responsible for sex-selective abortion. In fact, I don’t think I mention “women’s empowerment” in either my blog post or my review. I’m pretty convinced by Hvistendahl’s work that the witches brew is enormously complicated and that there’s enough blame to go around for everyone: feminists, Western Malthusians, patriarchical cultures, the economics of development, meddling non-profits and NGOs, science, etc.

The argument I was making–and his non-response makes even clearer–is much less grand: I was merely pointing out that Serwer’s errors suggested that maybe he didn’t read Hvistendahl’s book very carefully. But maybe I’m wrong!