Slate’s William Saletan looks at the battle over pharmacists who refuse to dispense the morning after pill.

Go to the Web sites of the major pro-life players, and run a search for anything related to pharmacists. I got three hits from the National Right to Life Committee, none since 2001. I got eight hits from Concerned Women for America, none on pharmacists’ rights since 2002. Even the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, characterized in some reports as a big campaigner for pharmacists’ rights, hasn’t touched the subject in four months. The Senate and House majority leaders haven’t mentioned it. It’s been raised at the White House just once—by a reporter—and the president’s spokesman ducked it.

Why the silence? Because from a strategic standpoint, it’s a stinker of an issue for pro-lifers. In recent years, they’ve gained the upper hand by focusing relentlessly on late-term fetuses that look like babies. Notice what’s featured on NRLC’s home page today: A Bush administration directive to protect “infants who had been born alive after unsuccessful abortions.” A fight over morning-after pills would push the abortion debate backward, not just to the beginning of pregnancy, but beyond it, to the stage between conception and implantation. Pro-lifers can’t even agree among themselves that a pre-implantation embryo is sacred—most such embryos spontaneously miscarry—and they’d have a hell of a time persuading people that this microscopic entity, which looks nothing like a baby, should be treated like one.

Saletan also had this little zinger.

Who’s fighting hardest for pro-life pharmacists? Pharmacists for Life. Now, there’s a shocker. According to the Post, the group “claims 1,600 members on six continents.” Come on. That’s less than 300 members per continent. Pharmacists for Life may be doing the Lord’s work, but its Web site is politically insane—constantly referring to the Serbian-American governor of Illinois, for example, as “Slobodan” Blagojevich.

After what I thought was a bit of a rough start (announcing his emergency rule just before Pope John Paul II’s death), this has turned into a great issue for Blagojevich. And Saletan is right that it’s a no-win issue for the Right.