It would have been great fun; it might have been historic; but it was not to be. Governor Casey's health went south, the challenge to President Clinton never materialized, and the throw-weight of pro-lifers within the Democratic Party was further reduced. Where all of that eventually led was demonstrated in early 2010, when pro-life Democrats in the House of Representatives provided the slim margin of victory for Obamacare--the implementers of which are now whittling away religious freedom and asking dental insurers whether they provide abortion coverage in their plans, all in the name of a virtually unlimited and government-funded right to abortion-on-demand.

As the natural successor to the classic civil rights movement, the pro-life cause ought to have been a bipartisan cause; it should certainly have been the cause of Catholic progressives. Yet as early as 1967, Richard John Neuhaus, then a Lutheran pastor and a civil rights veteran, warned his fellow-liberals in a Commonweal article that they were betraying the civil rights cause by flirting with "liberalized " abortion laws. Neuhaus's article won a prize from the Catholic Press Association; but that was then, and this is now. And as the Democratic Party has become ever more intransigent on the abortion question--with rare exceptions like Congressman Dan Lipinski (D-Illinois), a true pro-life hero--the pro-life cause has been abandoned by the old pro-civil rights coalition, even as African-American communities are decimated by the abortion license.

In any case, the pro-life stakes in 2012 could not be greater. Men and women of conscience will form their judgments accordingly.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.