A Vatican reporter last week said John Paul was the perfect pope for the television age, "a man of images." Think of the pictures of him storm-tossed, tempest-tossed, standing somewhere and leaning into a heavy wind, his robes whipping behind him, holding on to his crosier, the staff bearing the image of a crucified Christ, with both hands, for dear life, as if consciously giving Christians a picture of what it is to be alive.

Benedict, the reporter noted, is the perfect pope for the Internet age. He is a man of the word. You download the text of what he said, print it, ponder it.

Now Benedict comes to America, his first trip as pope. The highlight in the Vatican's eyes is his address to the United Nations. No one knows what he will say. He will no doubt call for peace, for that is what popes do, and should do. Beyond that? Perhaps some variation on themes from his famous Regensburg address, in September 2006.

There he traced and limned some of the development of Christianity, but he turned first to Islam. Faith in God does not justify violence, he said. "The right use of reason" prompts us to understand that violence is incompatible with the nature of God, and the nature, therefore, of the soul. God, he quotes an ancient Byzantine ruler, "is not pleased by blood," and "not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature." More: "To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm." This is a message for our time, and a courageous one, too. (The speech was followed by riots and by Osama bin Laden's charge that the pope was starting a new "crusade.")

The logic of production is freely carried out in the treatment of manufactured embryos, though tellingly the State wants some control over the kind of offspring parents may accept. The sinister concept of the ‘permitted’ embryo, and the permission for embryos to be ‘preferred’ for transfer as healthy, but not as sick or disabled, are obvious examples. Not everyone is welcome in the libertarian Brave New World.  

The brutal disregarding of the respect and reverence due to human procreation is continued in allowing human material to be used to substitute for animal sperm or ova or their parts. Whatever the risk of creating actual human embryos -- which depends on the specific technique -- it devalues human procreation to interact this way with animal reproductive processes. 

What can be done?  We can fight for amendments that prohibit abuses, or mitigate their effects -- without, however, telling anyone how to plan, or carry out, such abuses. An example would be birth certificates, which can and should record donor conception, for the benefit of any child conceived.  At the end of the line, we can oppose the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, braving any repercussions this involves, and supporting others with any repercussions they experience.  And, of course, we can pray.

At the core of the debate is the notion of government compulsion, always a worse form of tyranny than mere prohibition. Compulsion is an extremely dangerous thing that should be avoided whenever possible, even when it could reasonably be considered legitimate. An example: We hate the military draft in this country, and rightly so. Even when the draft is in effect, we let draftees attain status as conscientious objectors.

So why, then, on arguably the most contentious political issue in America (abortion), would we even consider compelling people on either side to actively violate their consciences? Even if the nearest pharmacist is on Mars, why would we use such a horrible tool as compulsion for the sake of a completely imaginary "right" to purchase a particular product? Even when there is no conscience aspect involved, can we ever compel sales of any particular product without trampling on fundamental personal rights? 

The culture wars between Red and Blue States are driven in large part by these objective differences in how family-friendly they are, financially speaking. For example the liberal San Francisco-Oakland area is twice as expensive as the conservative Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The BestPlaces.net calculator reports, “To maintain the same standard of living, your salary of $100,000 in San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, California could decrease to $49,708 in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas.”

Affordable family formation won’t predict who will win this November. But it offers profound implications for long-range political strategies. For example, the late housing bubble, over which Republicans George W. Bush and Alan Greenspan complacently presided, reduced the affordability of family formation, which should help the Democrats in the long run.

The media continue to largely ignore America’s long-term abortion decline. Instead, they continue provide plenty of favorable coverage to a relatively small number of analyses which supposedly indicate that both the passage of pro-life legislation and support for pro-life candidates does little to affect the incidence of abortion.

But before the media and pro-choice activists insist that the incidence of abortion is unaffected by its legal status and attempts to legally restrict abortion are doomed to failure, they may want to consider looking at the trends and reviewing the research — including research published by organizations that support legal abortion.