By Richard Brookhiser

February 4, 2001 | 7:00 p.m

It has been a month of mixed news for the fetus-confused

signals, coming from unexpected directions. One of the clearer signals came from the left. The week of Martin Luther King Day, the nation witnessed the agony of Jesse Jackson. With both King and Mr. Jackson enrolled in the ranks of tomcats, it begins to look as if the class act among the black political clergy is Al Sharpton. But I come not to bury Mr. Jackson, but to praise him-for the only good thing in the whole sad episode was the fact that he and his mistress chose to have their child. By saving the girl's life, or at least acquiescing in her birth, Mr. Jackson came full circle. As he himself (self-servingly) told us, he was illegitimate, the son of Helen Burns, a high school student in Greenville, S. C., and Noah Robinson, a married man who lived next door. What he did not tell us was that his mother had thought of aborting him, until a minister persuaded her not to. Early in his public career, when he was still only a Chicago celebrity, he referred to abortion as "murder." As soon as he began making symbolic runs for President, he of course changed his tune; he could not hold down a career as a Democratic Party tummler while being pro-life. But after almost 20 years of inauthenticity, when the choice came to him and his lover, they chose life. Maybe his daughter will grow up to be a wiser person than he is; maybe she will be worse, though that's hard to imagine. But at least she will grow up. Across the aisle in Right World, the G.O.P., the party that claims (depending on who is listening) to be pro-life, was feinting so many ways it looked as if it might lunge into its own end zone. The new first lady, Laura Bush, told an interviewer that she did not think Roe v. Wade should be overturned, while in the Senate, John Ashcroft, the pro-life Pentecostalist nominated to be Attorney General, informed his former colleagues that the judgment of Roe was the settled law of the land, not to be questioned by mere cabinet members. A friend of mine from Missouri, showing the class stigmata of his upbringing, wondered if Ashcroft had ever spoken in tongues? I suggested that perhaps his testimony was a burst of liberal glossolalia: John Peter Zenger, Areopagitica , defend to the death your right to say it, alleluia! Whatever the truth of the matter, it looked like important Republicans were engaging once more in that old G.O.P. culture-war two-step: keeping the snake handlers in line, while giving a wink to the rich old babes at the country club, fingering their pearls and their martinis. But first ladies and donors do not make policy (at least not, let us hope, in this administration); direction will have to come from President Bush. One of his first acts in office was to repeal a Clinton-era executive order which allowed federal money to go to groups that advocate aborting foreigners-a tidy little gift to Planned Parenthood and its friends. (Maybe they can make up the shortfall from the Chinese, whose one-child policy makes them obvious soul mates.) That was a welcome sign. But what will George W. do about abortions in this country? Unless he finds a conservative black lesbian, he will have a hell of a time getting anyone on the Supreme Court. He can say all he wants that every child should be "welcomed in life," but politicians do not welcome continuous battle on all fronts. If he has to cut taxes, revive the military, reform education and give the elderly cheap drugs, then an easy defensive perimeter on the abortion question-no subsidies, no killing babies who are already poking out, but no help for the million-plus per year who are caught in the womb (gotcha!)-will seem very attractive to him. On the other hand, as a friend who knows George W. told me, admiringly, "He's a prick." Meaning, beneath the aw-shucks and the extra syllables, he stubbornly pursues what he wants and doesn't care much about criticism, or at all about his critics. At the same time, it is true that he wants to lower partisan tension, dismantle the Clintonian attack machine and woo the undecided voters who broke so steeply against him over the last weekend of the campaign. He is both a tough guy and a healer. Better to be that than Richard Nixon, who was abrasive without being terribly principled. Maybe the pro-life movement is entering a period in which its greatest gains will not be made in the realm of politics. The fight for life is often compared to the fight against slavery: Both were waged against people, many of them self-interested, but many of them decent, even noble, who could not see the humanity of the parties at issue. Since the earlier struggle ended in fratricidal war, it is to be hoped that the comparison does not extend to the narrative level; I don't know what Cardinal Egan thinks, but I am not ready to refight the Battle of the Wilderness just yet. So events between 1830 and 1860 may have their modern parallels out of sequence. For a period, abolitionists spurned politics, relying entirely on moral suasion. John Jay Chapman's biography of William Lloyd Garrison describes the electric effect of a gesture so simple as walking down a Boston street with a black man and introducing him to one's friends, including one's lady friends, as one would any white stranger. No one can meet a fetus. If we call and leave our cards, the visit will not be returned. But six months later, or six years later, or 16 years later-the visit could be returned then. The nameless being will not have grown into a manatee, or a tumor, or a toenail. It will be Jesse Jackson, dishonest, impossible and occasionally eloquent. Or it will be his daughter. Or it will be you, hypocrite reader, my double, my brother.