COLUMN: Will Trump survive abortion minefield?

There are some things you just don’t say.

At least, there are some things you don’t say if you are a conservative. That goes for both candidates and columnists. You learn to tiptoe around controversy in order to avoid losing voters, friends, readers, supporters, whatever it happens to be.

This is the America we live in now.

So when Donald Trump said he thought women who have abortions should be punished, it came as no surprise that he was blasted to kingdom come.

You just don’t say that kind of thing any more. Even if you believe it, you don’t say it — because you don’t want to offend the millions of women who have had abortions. The art of politics, after all, is not offending a majority of voters so that you can be elected in order to not offend a majority of legislators so that you can pass legislation that will not offend a majority of lobbyists, special interests and media personalities so that you can be re-elected on a platform of being inoffensive.

Or you could be Donald Trump, and try to speak from your heart rather than from what is convenient or politically correct.

Of course, with his latest comments on abortion, Trump may have gone too far to ever be elected. He may have gone from being politically incorrect to being politically unviable.

We shall see. Trump is certainly unpredictable, but the machinations of the political world are not. The establishment has been gunning for Trump since day one, and they may finally have nailed him.

When I heard Trump was doing a town hall meeting with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, I thought, uh oh, that’s a huge mistake. Oil and water. Or more to the point, fire and gasoline.

Sure enough, Matthews loaded up on Trump with one of his patented questions, which he has asked numerous times before to see if he can get a reaction. Matthews, an avowed Catholic, said he has “never understood the pro-life position” and then asked Trump of abortion, “What crime is it?”

Trump pointed out that it is “a human life,” meaning the end result of abortion is the taking of a human life.

At this juncture, Matthews asked Trump his million-dollar question — the one which every politician is smart enough not to answer, or to answer in a politically correct manner, but which Trump in his untrained, off-the-cuff manner, tried to respond to with an honest and common-sense answer.

“Should the woman be punished for having an abortion?”

There are lots of politically correct answers possible:

— “The woman is being punished enough by being deprived of her child, and will be wracked with guilt for what she has done.”

— “The woman is a victim as much as her child.”

— “If Roe v. Wade is overturned, that’s going to have to be decided by individual states. It’s unlikely that any state will punish a woman for having an abortion, but we will have to wait and see.”

Then when Chris Matthews comes back and says “This is not something you can dodge,” you dodge again and say something like, “The first thing we have to do is stop — as a society — sanctioning the killing of unborn babies. Where we go from there, it’s unclear, but we as a society will be better off as soon as we restore the sanctity of innocent human life.”

If you know how the game is played, you don’t answer the question. You sidestep. You tiptoe. You play politics.

But Trump doesn’t do what he is supposed to do. In Trump’s mind, the world is black and white. That’s probably why he appeals to blue-collar voters and infuriates ivory-tower elites.

But when you come right down to it — if abortion is made illegal (which is the premise of Matthews’ question) then there has to be culpability on the part of the willing woman as well as on the person performing the abortion, doesn’t there?

Isn’t that the premise of charging a prostitute with a crime? Or a drug user? What makes it such a stretch to charge a woman with having an illegal abortion? What makes it “politically incorrect” to talk about punishment for a crime?

Only one thing — the belief that there is no God, and therefore no absolute right and wrong. That’s why drug users are now seen as victims instead of criminals. That’s why prostitution is largely viewed as a victimless crime. And, yes, that’s why women think they should have a right to end their pregnancy whether or not it also means ending a human life.

But even my 5-year-old is smart enough to see the evasion of responsibility implicit in that point of view. We were watching Hillary Clinton defend abortion and vilify Trump on the news, and my son Huzhao asked me what it was about.

I told him that Trump had made the case for punishment for women who have an abortion and that some women did not like that idea.

Huzhao’s response? “Then why do they get pregnant in the first place?”

I guess to a 5-year-old, morality is also black and white. If it’s wrong, why do it?

Say what you like about Trump (or what you don’t like!) but he has generated more honest discussion of big issues in the past nine months than any other candidate: Nations need borders ... Nations don’t need to import terrorists ... War is not always the answer ... Free trade is not always fair trade ... World security is expensive and the United States can’t pay for all of it ... And yeah, actions have consequences.

Trump never said what he thought the punishment should be for a woman who has an abortion. Maybe it will just be a guilty conscience after all, but in a world of good and evil acts, the consequences of evil must be acknowledged somehow. It’s not politically correct, but it just makes sense.