Oh, I get why people, like myself, who reject many of the assumptions that animate the pro-life movement, would be scandalized. But why those who do accept those assumptions would be bothered by the suggestion that it might become necessary to take up arms to stop the slaughter — that doesn’t really make sense to me.

By the way, in the 19 years since the symposium raised the possibility of armed insurrection to stop the killing, more than 14 million additional babies have been butchered.

Maybe anti-abortion violence remains relatively rare because, as Douthat implies, pro-lifers have been persuaded by just war reasoning not to take up arms. But there’s another possibility.

Perhaps most abortion opponents refrain from actions that their rhetoric would seem to incite because they don’t actually believe what they’re saying. At least not fully, entirely, all the way down. Yes, they think abortion is morally wrong, but not that it’s murder in quite the way that killing tens of millions of 5-year-olds, or 30-year-olds, would be murder.