Asking Rudy "Why?"

FoxNews has posted the transcript of Chris Wallace's interview with Rudy Giuliani on Fox New Sunday. Wallace, as Melinda Penner points out, does something many interviewers won't do - ask Giuliani why he is so personally opposed to abortion. I probably would have liked one more why question as a follow up. For example, why are childbirth and adoption better options than abortion?, but I'm glad Wallace went further than most interviewer who typically accept the question dodge Rudy tried originally.

WALLACE: You say that while you support a woman's right to choose, that you personally hate abortion and you wish people didn't have them.

GIULIANI: That's a position that many...

WALLACE: My question is: Why?

GIULIANI: Many millions of Americans have that same position that I have.

Personally, if you asked my advice, if a woman asked my advice about abortion, the advice that I would give is: Shouldn't have the abortion, better to have the child, I'll help you, I'll support you in that choice.

WALLACE: But my question is: Why?

GIULIANI: Why?

WALLACE: Yeah.

GIULIANI: Because I think having the child is a much better decision. I think it's a much better moral decision. I think it's much better for society.

I think adoption is a better option than abortion. I supported that position by helping adoptions increase in New York when I was the mayor by 66 percent.

Another interesting part of the interview comes when Wallace asks Giuliani about embryonic stem cell research and asks Giuliani if he thinks embryos are a life. Giuliani response doesn't really make any sense.

I don't look at it that way. I don't think it's for me to decide. I can't decide when life begins. All that I can decide is, you know, what are the constitutional issues? What are the legal issues? How do you deal with these things?

I mean, how do deal with these things (legal, constitutional issues) if you don't know whether the human embryo is a living human being or not? Isn't the question of whether the human embryo is a living human being the foremost question here? If the embryo isn't then why are there legal or constitutional questions?

Rudy's answers on why his positions on limiting abortion also don't make sense to me. Parental consent laws had judicial bypasses built in long before 1997. The 1992 Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey was a decision which in part ruled Pennsylvania's updated parental consent law, which had a judicial bypass, was constitutional. So that's not a real reason for him to have changed his position on these laws since 1997.

Rudy also claims he changed his mind about the partial-birth abortion ban because of the congressional findings in the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 which found the procedure was not needed to save a mother's health. But these same arguments were around when Congress was debating partial-birth abortion in 1997.

Tags: rudy giuliani, abortion