Ramesh Ponnuru reports that Andrew Sullivan is talking funny, this time with a reader on the topic of abortion. A letter written to Sullivan asserts that philosophies against abortion "cannot be formulated in any fashion that is coherent to someone," because, in making a forced choice during an imagined fire at a fertility clinic, to administer the principle that "even the earliest zygote should be treated as a person" is to "do what we all know is repugnant, saving the far greater number of embryos, pretending that they are people." Then? One must reject inviolability of the womb "to recognize that yes, there is a great difference between a person and an embryo."
The implication of Sullivan's correspondent, as Ponnuru noted, is that a pro-life position is refuted by logic itself. But this isn't correct, as least as stated in the prevailing pro-choice conjecture. Assume the major and minor premises respectively are 1) All innocent human life is worth protecting, 2) No human embryo qualifies as a living person or for that matter innocent; from which follows a conclusion that 3) No human embryo is worth protecting. We have a universal affirmative, followed by a universal negative, from which another universal negative is drawn.
As truth, the claim may be so; thereby all the controversy. Illustrated, diagrammed, it is patently wanting: there are, between Venn's circles, instances where the embryo, alive or instead a pretend person, should be safeguarded. This argument, at its rational fundament — which is where Sullivan and his advocate want to take us — is invalid.