I thought that I had heard every pro-life argument until I read about Danna Vale. Vale is a Liberal Party member of the Australian Parliament. During the debate over the availability of the abortifacent RU-486, Vale told her colleagues that it was important that they consider the implications of abortion "for the community and the nation we become in the future."

Specifically, Vale invoked the possibility that, due to high abortion rates, Australia might become "a Muslim nation in 50 years' time." That projection actually belonged to an imam whom Vale had read about. Still, his comments and some back-of-the-envelope math left Vale convinced that Australians were in the process of "aborting ourselves almost out of existence...."

Her remarks touched a raw nerve in Australia, which until the early 1970s adhered to an immigration policy commonly known as the "White Australia Policy." (More recently, the controversial One Nation Party ran on an anti-immigration platform that claimed that Australia was "in danger of being swamped by Asians.") Thus, the response to her remarks were pretty much what you would have expected: they were called "outrageous," "offensively discriminatory," and, of course, "bigoted." It didn't help matters that she got her math wrong — by a lot.

I wish Vale had used a different example because an important issue was lost in the furor over her comments and bad math. Columnist Mark Steyn identified this issue when he wrote that you don't have to agree with Vale's specific assertions to ask "is abortion good for society?"

Your answer to that question can, or at least should, be independent of your opinion on the morality of abortion or whether it should be legal. It's possible to be pro-choice, as Steyn seems to be, and agree with him when he writes that the "the state has absolutely no interest in encouraging women in general to exercise" the right to an abortion.

For Steyn, making abortion easier in a country that is both dependent on immigration and nervous about who's immigrating, seems, well, kind of foolish. Then again, our thinking about marriage, family and sexuality is often characterized by a persistent folly. Since "folly" isn't a word you come across every day — you are scarcely less likely to hear someone say "gadzooks!" or "egad!" — most people think that it's a pretentious synonym for "wrong."

It's not. The late historian Barbara Tuchman defined "folly" as a group's "pursuit of [a] policy contrary to self-interest" despite the availability of an alternative that was recognized as such at the time. Tuchman's examples included George III's response to colonial grievances prior to the American Revolution, the actions of the Renaissance popes and, more recently, the decisions that led to the Vietnam War.

While Tuchman wrote about the actions of government, her definition applies equally well to other groups. Like governments, political parties, interest groups and even (especially?) churches embrace that are contrary to their best interests, despite ample warning.

Folly over abortion isn't limited to Oz. Here in the U.S., the past few years have witnessed an intensified criticism of Roe and the abortion regime from an unexpected quarter: liberals. For its liberal critics, the problem with Roe isn't only that it's bad jurisprudence, although it is — it's also bad politics, at least for liberals.

One such liberal critic, Benjamin Wittes of the Washington Post and Atlantic Monthly, has written about the way Roe has distorted liberal politics. The high-handed and undemocratic way that abortion-on-demand was imposed on the entire country ensures the existence of a permanent and intensely committed opposition.

This opposition, and the pro-Roe response, has, in Wittes' estimation, turned the Supreme Court confirmation process into an "ugly spectacle" in which a "single narrow issue pushes to the sidelines discussion of the broad array of other important legal questions the Supreme Court handles." By "important legal questions" Witte, who "generally favor[s] permissive abortion laws," means questions of importance to liberals: limitations on executive power, the environment, and protection of civil liberties.

For Wittes, "the costs of defending Roe have grown too high, and I'm just not willing to pay them anymore." That's why, in a 2005 Atlantic Monthly piece, he urged his fellow liberals to "chill out"; let go of Roe; and have enough confidence in the popularity of their position to take their chances in state legislatures.

As you've probably guessed, Wittes' proposal hasn't gotten very far. Not because he's been proven wrong or even really disputed but because what he's proposing is unthinkable. Just how unthinkable was illustrated by William Saletan of SLATE. Writing in the New York Times, Saletan called on his fellow pro-choicers to "wage war on the abortion rate through birth control and sex education." His modest proposal was called "anti-abortion moralism" that would "do the antichoicers' work for them."

If abortion-rights advocates can't bring themselves to say that fewer abortions would be desirable, it's difficult to imagine them letting go of Roe. They will continue a course of action that many of their allies believe is detrimental to their interests because doing things differently is literally out of the question. In other words, folly.

If this kind of folly were limited to pro-choice activists, it wouldn't matter, at least not to a committed "antichoicer" like me. It's not — much of our thinking about, not only abortion, but family and sexuality, as well, is dominated by notions of "choice" and personal fulfillment. What's more, Americans increasingly believe that it's not enough to be legally free to do and live as you please — your choices must also be exempt from judgment and evaluation. In other words, you have a moral "right" not to feel bad about your "lifestyle" choices. This includes not having to think about the social consequences of these choices.

Now, a society can tolerate the occasional eccentric or even libertine without much damage but when all choices are deemed equally worthy of respect and stigma is regarded as a kind of hate speech, the likelihood of folly increases almost exponentially. By the time the consequences of certain choices become apparent, it's usually too late to do anything about it: the damage is irreversible or the choices are regarded as inviolable.

And that's what I think that Danna Vale was, however awkwardly, getting at. Some of your "choices" are my business and vice-versa. We know that. In fact we, as J. Budziszewski might put it, we cannot not know that — we've merely opted to ignore it in matters such as abortion. As a result, we embrace what we ought to shun and ignore what we ought to heed, which is folly by anyone's definition.