Opinion/Mark Steyn: A decade ago, Elizabeth Taylor was going from one celebrity AIDS rally to another urging us to make sure we "use a condom each and every time you make love".
Every time, Liz? Apparently so, until one day mankind is extinct and giant condoms roam the earth, bouncing across the ruins of our civilization like playful prophylactics in animated Scandinavian health ministry announcements.
The spirit of Liz lurks deep within America's abortion movement. For people who talk endlessly about "reproductive rights", they seem remarkably indifferent, if not downright hostile, to exercising them.
I concede that I'm anti-abortion. If I were pro-abortion, I'd probably sound like Teresa Heinz Kerry, who told Newsweek the other day that the act involves "stopping the process of life" but that "I ask myself if I had a 13-year-old daughter who got drunk one night and got pregnant, what would I do?"
If I had to go a bit further, I might even sign on to her husband's line ("safe, legal, rare", blah, blah, nuanced boilerplate, zzzzzzz).
In a sign of the increasing difficulties the issue poses for Democrats, Sen Kerry has now said that he would be open to appointing Supreme Court judges who opposed abortion as long as the court retained a majority who supported abortion.
This is consistent with his own position as a devout Catholic who nevertheless supports abortion. His general line is that he's all in favour of strong personal beliefs on the issue as long as you don't act on them.
Oh, well. If I can just about conceive (if you'll forgive the expression) the leap from my position to Teresa's and from Teresa's to Senator Flippy's, I can't imagine how you'd get from Senator Flippy's to the bulk of the sentiments on display at the Million Abortionist March, or whatever it was called, in Washington last month. What a sight: Whoopi Goldberg brandishing coat hangers. Surly women stomping about with "Keep Your Bush Off My Bush" placards. The decay of a fluffy soft-focus euphemism into just another crude insult: "If Only Barbara Bush Had Choice."
The freaky, barely grasped meaning of all those speakers' regrets that their own mothers never enjoyed the freedoms they have... As firebrand Congresswoman Maxine Waters put it: "I have to march because my mother could not have an abortion."
The casual dismissal of half the human race: "The Opinions Of Those With Nothing At Stake Are Worth Little"; "If Men Got Pregnant, They'd Make Abortion A Sacrament." Actually, it's the sisterhood who've made abortion the sacrament for a brave new religion of the self. Had Teresa Heinz Kerry stood up and read out her Newsweek quotes, she'd have been booed; no one on the Mall wanted to hear about the agonised parents of distraught adolescents helping them to make the soi-disant "difficult personal decision". Abortion isn't difficult or agonising, but something to be celebrated, the central freedom of a modern woman's identity.
Before the century is out, the left will come to regret the conflation of feminism and abortion.
When a young lady demands that my Bush be kept off her bush, she's referring to political interference in a "woman's right to choose".
In fact, it's the abortion absolutists who insist on political intervention. Unlike most aspects of life in America, the absolutists insist abortion has to be legislated uniformly, coast to coast - and beyond: half the complaints about Bush's "war on women" (thank you, the New York Times) revolve around his disinclination to spend taxpayers' dollars promoting abortion overseas. Which begs the question: leaving aside the moral questions, what is the state's interest in abortion? The answer to that is obvious: the most urgent problem facing the Western world right now is the big lack of babies. In Europe, abortion is part of the settled political consensus and its persistence as an issue over here is seen as further evidence - along with guns, capital punishment and functioning militaries - of American backwardness. The result is collapsed birthrates in Mediterranean countries of around 1.1, 1.2 per cent per couple - that's to say, about half of what's called "replacement rate". Even if you subscribe to the premise of the Supreme Court's landmark abortion decision, Roe vs Wade - that abortion is a privacy issue - society as a whole has no interest in elevating a "woman's right to choose" to state policy.
The government's interest lies in increasing birth rates, to avoid the death spiral of post-Catholic Italy. If any Democrat understands that, she or he is in no hurry to speak up.
Which leads to the next question: who will be the first victims of the West's collapsed birth rates? In Europe, the only country still exercising its "reproductive rights" at replacement rate is Muslim Albania. The rest of the continent is dependent on immigration mainly from North Africa and the Middle East. Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by "a woman's right to choose".
In other words, by exercising a woman's right to choose to the present unprecedented degree, Western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad.
The hyper-rationalism of radical individualism isn't, in the end, rational at all. A culture that can't be bothered reproducing is a culture that doesn't understand its greatest resource. You'll recall that during the Iraq war, we heard a lot of talk about ancient Mesopotamia - the land of the Sumerians, Akkadians and Hittites - being "the cradle of civilisation". That's the point. Without a cradle, it's hard to sustain a civilisation.