At stake is the right to abortion – in China. And so the feminist left and Democrats in this country are mobilizing to oppose the nomination of Ellen Sauerbrey as assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. Among Sauerbrey’s sins is her support for the Bush administration’s policy of denying U.S. dollars to the U.N. Population Fund because that organization is entangled with China’s abortion-dependent, one-child policy.

In recent years, foreign-policy analysts have noted that the left has seemed to lose interest in attempting to spread its ideals abroad. Not quite. If democracy promotion has lost its appeal for the left during the Bush years, it still fervently believes in abortion promotion.

It is not really accurate to say that “the right to abortion” is at stake in China. It really is “the right not to abort” that is controversial. This right is opposed by the Chinese government, the one-child policy of which has long had an element of coercion to it. Amnesty International’s latest report on China noted, “Serious violations against women and girls continued to be reported as a result of the enforcement of the family-planning policy, including forced abortions and sterilizations.”

This is the very opposite of the “right to choose” defended by people who shout, “Hands off our bodies.” No controversy distills quite so clearly the fact that abortion-rights groups are functionally pro-abortion. “Safe, legal and rare” is the favorite sound bite for pro-choice politicians trying to sound reasonable. But when it comes to China, many Democrats are satisfied with “safe, legal and forced.”

Sauerbrey has earned the feminists’ ire for a few other pro-life positions she has taken, even though the job for which she is nominated overwhelmingly has to do with the care of refugees. But abortion is the King Charles’ head of the Democratic Party. Like the lunatic in Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield” who can’t finish a manuscript because the severed head of King Charles I keeps popping into his mind, the Democrats can hardly finish a political thought without abortion intruding. The Supreme Court rules on important issues from affirmative action to the detention of enemy combatants, but, for Democrats, all of that is eclipsed by the court’s role in protecting the nation from any restriction on abortion whatsoever.

It’s abortion ber alles. There is no value it doesn’t trump. Liberals assail any hiring or workplace policies that have a “disparate impact” on blacks. Abortion disproportionately eliminates black babies – but liberals shrug. To their credit, Democrats are advocates for the disabled, but when abortion is used to systematically destroy handicapped children in the womb, they are unmoved. Feminists champion women’s rights overseas, but when sex-selection abortions in China create a yawning 40 million deficit of girls, there is little outrage, and most of it is reserved for the pro-lifers who are too zealous about trying to do something about it.

Its morality aside, abortion absolutism is bad politics for the Democrats. It allows Republicans to advocate minor restrictions at the margin – a partial-birth abortion ban, for instance – that they know are popular, but Democrats will reflexively oppose. Shrewd GOP marketing, you say? Perhaps, but Democrats are happy to do it to themselves. They have focused their abortion-related opposition to Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito around one of his decisions holding that a spousal-notification requirement was constitutional. Spousal notification enjoys the support of roughly 70 percent of the public, but that is the ground on which the feminist left wants to fight.

Even Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean realizes Democrats have hurt themselves on abortion. His solution is to refuse to call the Democratic Party “pro-choice.” Democrats need not disavow that label, however, so long as they don’t discredit it with an obsessive opposition to the slightest check on abortion anywhere in America or the world.

Alas, that seems beyond their powers of self-control. To abortion they will always be true.

Rich Lowry is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached via e-mail at: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com.

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