Senator Schumer has a nearly perfect record of voting for abortion rights. But all of a sudden, he’s come down with a fit of concern for the unborn. Check out the senior senator from New York’s recent press release complaining of the “deep benefit cuts for middle class seniors” allegedly proposed by President Bush as part of a plan to put Social Security on a sounder long-term fiscal basis.

“There would be at least a 28% benefit cut for a worker who is born five years from now, who retires at age 65, and who has average career earnings,” the Schumer press release warns. “There would be at least a 42% benefit cut for a worker who is born five years from now, who retires at age 65, and who has career earnings that are ‘the equivalent’ of $59,000 in 2005.”

Notice those key words “born five years from now.” Senator Schumer, to judge by his votes in the Senate, doesn’t buy into the idea that unborn children or fetuses or embryos, call them what you will, need to be protected against being harvested and destroyed for stem-cell research or being destroyed by their parents as a method of birth control. This same senator who opposes banning late-term abortions – in other words, who votes as if he doesn’t believe an unborn child has a right to life – thinks that children who are four years away from even being conceived, let alone born, have some claim on Social Security benefits indexed to wages rather than prices.

These five-years-away-from-being-born children haven’t paid a dime of payroll tax yet. They haven’t heard a single politician promise them anything in the way of Social Security benefits. Even the anti-abortion zealots at Operation Rescue would have to admit that they don’t even exist, let alone have “benefits” that could be “cut.” Mr. Schumer is 54; by the time these “born five years from now” children reach retirement age, he will be 124.

Now, these columns oppose a federal constitutional amendment outlawing abortion. We believe that abortion laws should be left to the states, and that in New York, it should be legal to have an abortion when the life or health, including the mental health, of the mother is at risk. But that is beside the point. There are good arguments and good people on all sides of the abortion issue. Whatever position you take on abortion, though, it seems to us extreme to the point of absurdity in a society that can’t even reach a consensus on whether a viable fetus has a right to life to argue that a child who hasn’t even been conceived yet has a claim on a better-than-inflation growth rate in Social Security benefits.