There once was a nation governed by the push and shove between two political parties. The members of each party loathed the members of the opposing party, and many people derived their identity as citizens primarily from their shared hatred of the other party’s members.

One party was called the Party of the Unborn. To Unbornists, the object of their greatest affection was children of the womb. The life of an unborn child is sacred, the Unbornists believed. Many Unbornists chose their political leaders and made their political decisions based almost exclusively on what was best for the unborn.

The other party was the Party of Anything Goes. Anythingians were devoted to the proposition that citizens should be free to do almost anything they wish to do. Accordingly, Anythingians believed people should be free to terminate the lives of unwanted unborn children. That, of course, pitted them against the Unbornists, who believed in the supremacy of unborn life.

“The Anythingians are murderers,” the Unbornists charged. “The Unbornists are totalitarians who want to force everyone to live according to their rules,” the Anythingians complained.

One might think, from those brief descriptions, that Unbornists and Anythingians were as different as night and day. But things are rarely that unambiguous. For example, oddly, to the Unbornists, the paycheck was the other sacred object of their veneration, second in esteem only to the sanctity of the unborn child. The bigger the paycheck, the more sacred it was. The Unbornists pledged themselves to protect their paychecks with nearly as much vigor as they spent protecting unborn children.

Anythingians, on the other hand, were not so opposed to the taxation of paychecks, particular large paychecks, the very paychecks Unbornists worked the hardest to protect. Unbornists loved to point out that the Anything Goes Party’s penchant for taxation violated their central doctrine. “How can you hypocritical Anythingians claim to believe people ought to be let alone to do as they please, if you authorize the government to confiscate our paychecks?” the Unibornists would chide.

Each party imagined itself to be the diametric opposite of the other party, and their members defined their loyalty by the degree to which they hated the opposing party and its members. However, to an outside observer, the two parties seemed to have much more in common than either party would admit.

For example, although they professed to believe that anything goes, in actuality the Anythingians had their own long list of behaviors that they believed should be illegal. The difference between the parties wasn’t really about how much freedom individual citizens should be guaranteed, but simply about which behaviors should be acceptable and which should be outlawed.

As for the Unbornists, they cherished their paychecks, and claimed to be the party committed to protecting paychecks from excessive government taxation. However, Unbornists had no qualms about taxes for causes they considered to be good, such as beefing up the military or waging war. Indeed, the greatest government expenditures consistently occurred during times when the Unbornists were in power. Nevertheless, the Unbornists disdained the Anythingians as the “tax and spend” party. In reality, both parties had few qualms about taxation; their only disagreement was on how to spend it.

When it came to children, the line between the two parties was impossible to navigate. Because the Party of the Unborn’s greatest doctrine was to protect the lives of unborn children, it would be logical to assume that they had a similar commitment to children after they were born. Logical, but wrong. Ironically, the Unbornists took the position that after a child drew its first breath, the child became the problem of its parents, and parent and child should be left to fend for themselves. The very life that the Unbornists considered sacred and inviolable before it was born became an object of no great concern after birth.

After all, a child has many needs: food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education. However, the Party of the Unborn worked hard to slash funding and when possible eliminate government programs devoted to the healthy development of children. Unbornists were adamantly opposed to “welfare,” programs so named because they were created to protect the welfare of children and their mothers. Unbornists derided such programs as “handouts” and condemned the “entitlement mentality” that created them. If a child was born to parents who were poor, or mentally ill, or in trouble with the law, or absent altogether, that was too bad for the child, but nobody else’s problem. A child is not entitled to anything — except, of course, the right to be born.

The Anything Goes Party, on the other hand, championed programs to help children. Anythingians favored tax-supported programs to provide adequate food and clothing and shelter and medical care and education for all children. Unbornists were vehemently against such programs; they even mocked the Anythingians, calling them “bleeding hearts” and “do-gooders,” because of their desire to help those in need.

However, while the Anything Goes Party prided itself for its compassionate concern for children, it was just as adamant about preserving the choice of parents to terminate the lives of unborn children. After birth, Anythingians preached, children’s rights should be a top priority. But in the womb, when a child is most vulnerable and defenseless, the child has no rights at all.

It’s a strange world.

I have told you about the nation and its two parties so you can better appreciate the unusual predicament I am in. Perhaps you can advise me. You see, I am a citizen of that nation, and I love my country. But I have never been a member of either party, and sometimes that makes me feel like a stranger in my own land. How could I ever be a member of a party that champions the slaughter of millions upon millions of children before they are born? And how could I ever be a member of a party that professes the sanctity of the life of a child, but believes sanctity of life stops the moment the child is born, and then abandons the child for the rest of its developmental years?

I agree with both parties that children should be a top priority of a civilized, compassionate society. But I do not agree that our compassion should be limited only to children who are not yet born, or only to children who have already been born. And I disagree that personal freedom, no matter how precious, or paychecks, no matter how hard-earned, should take priority over our duty as a society to protect and care for our children.