CLINTON DISAGREES WITH HIMSELF ON ABORTION, CHINA POLICY

When it comes to abortion, people who are pro-life have precious few beliefs in common with those who are pro-choice. But here's one: Bill Clinton is wrong. He has actually concocted an immigration policy so perverse that it infuriates people on both sides of the abortion issue. Clinton's new policy is neither pro-life nor pro-choice. It is pro-abortion.

Clinton recently resolved to deport to China 13 women who had fled from that country to America for asylum from mandatory abortion and from forced sterilization. Under the Reagan and Bush administrations, those women qualified as political refugees and were granted legal protection from their tyrannous government. Under Clinton, however, those women are inconvenient obstacles to economic agreement and political rapport. Consequently, those brutalized women are returned to the land of their terror, where they and their families face harsh retribution, including sexual abuse, torture, heavy fines and imprisonment.

Please don't think that this simultaneously anti-life and anti-choice decision is a one-time flirtation for Clinton. It isn't. You will probably recall that Henry Foster, Clinton's nominee for surgeon general, performed enforced sterilizations on retarded women in the 1970s, a procedure Clinton amazingly defended as cutting-edge medicine in its day. Perhaps you also will recall that Clinton approved a $50 million grant to the U.N. population-control program, which is heavily involved with mandatory abortion and enforced sterilization efforts of the Chinese government, thus reversing the Bush administration's refusal to make any U.S. contribution to these deadly and dictatorial practices.

Under current administration policy, neither mandatory abortion nor forced sterilization qualify as political persecution. Those who suffer them don't gain political asylum. Employing a rhetorical subterfuge that would have made George Orwell positively envious, Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Tim Worth observed that the administration's decision to return these 13 women to China was simply in keeping with the new mood in America to curb illegal immigration. Apparently no one at the White House can tell the difference between closing borders and closing wombs. No doubt they think the American voters can't tell the difference either, which is why they offered us such morally and intellectually offensive nonsense as a policy justification.

The Orwellian newspeak doesn't stop there. The decision to send these women back to China came from the man who said he wants abortion to be "legal, safe and rare," which can mean only that Clinton opposes himself. "Legal" doesn't mean "mandatory." It means "protected by law." Clinton cant seem to distinguish between "you man" and "you must." To consider abortion safe is possible only if you ignore the 1.5 million unborn persons who die from it every year in America alone. Furthermore, to make abortion safe for those who want to destroy their young by burning them alive in saline solution or by ripping off their arms, legs and head with a suction machine is about as perverse a national goal as to make bank robbing safe for crooks. As for making abortion rare, I simply remind you that the only nation on Earth to kill more its unborn than America is China, the very place Clinton decided these women ought to go. "Rare" isn't a word I would use to describe more than 1.5 million death a year. Try "holocaust."

It takes a lot to bring the pro-life and pro-choice movements together these days. But around Clinton we all can unite in slogan-shouting, placard-waving, moral outrage. He has canceled some unborn women's right to life and some born women's alleged right to choose. Whether you think of those victimized women as sisters or resisters, Clinton works against them in conjunction with the government of China.

Now Hillary Clinton has led the American delegation to the U.N. women's conference in, of all places, Beijing, which CNN calls "a place for women." Beijing is a place for women only in the same way a glue factory is a place for horses.

Michael Bauman if professor of theology and culture at Hillsdale College in Michigan.