“We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your own personal views on abortion,” Martha Raddatz, the moderator of the Vice-Presidential debate, said to Joe Biden and Paul Ryan. She added, “And, please, this is such an emotional issue for so many people in this country. Please talk personally about this, if you could.”

Making religion the frame meant that the discussion could range well beyond the dilemma of abortion in women’s lives. (Ryan: “Look at what they’re doing through Obamacare with respect to assaulting the religious liberties of this country.”) Raddatz, in one of her many excellent moments, returned to the point in a follow-up:

RADDATZ: I want to go back to the abortion question here. If the Romney-Ryan ticket is elected, should those who believe that abortion should remain legal be worried? RYAN: We don’t think that unelected judges should make this decision; that people through their elected representatives in reaching a consensus in society through the democratic process should make this determination.

The answer, in short, is yes, they should worry. This was a strong exchange for the Obama-Biden ticket, more perhaps than for Biden personally. He won this debate—Obama, clearly grateful, told reporters that he was proud—while being slightly more disorganized here than in his other answers. But it also showed how extreme the Republican Party’s position on abortion rights now is.

During the Presidential debate, abortion wasn’t discussed. It came fairly deep into this debate, after the candidates had, in some respects, already spoken about deeply personal things: after Ryan told a story about Romney’s personal charity toward a couple—fellow-Mormon congregants whose four children had been hurt (two of them paralyzed) in a car crash—Biden probably had to speak about the car crash that killed his wife and daughter and left his sons injured. Given the plot parallel, it was an odd anecdote for Ryan to choose. Ryan talked, too, in connection with the value of Social Security benefits, about how his own father had died when he was young. (Ryan said that Americans over fifty-five would keep getting what they’d been “promised”; all bets are off if you’re younger, though.) Both Biden and Ryan, being who they are, used the anecdotes for various points. But nowhere are the personal and political so closely woven as with the question of abortion.

Ryan went first. “Now, you want to ask basically why I’m pro-life? It’s not simply because of my Catholic faith. That’s a factor, of course. But it’s also because of reason and science.” “Science,” in this case, meant looking at an ultrasound image of his first child with his wife—an experience that is widely shared and rightly regarded with wonder. (The tiny image he saw was the source of his daughter’s nickname, Bean, he said.) And then, “the policy of a Romney administration will be to oppose abortions with the exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother”—carefully construed, as even this very restrictive list is more than Ryan, left to his own devices, would allow. Ryan doesn’t think that rape victims should have access to abortion. Biden pointed that out, with some fits and starts:

Now with regard to the way in which the—we differ, my friend says that he—well I guess he accepts Governor Romney’s position now, because in the past he has argued that there was—there’s rape and forcible rape. He’s argued that in the case of rape or incest, it was still—it would be a crime to engage in having an abortion. I just fundamentally disagree with my friend.

Biden is no radical on abortion. He began by talking about his acceptance, on a personal level, of the Catholic Church's teaching that human life begins at conception:

But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews, and I just refuse to impose that on others, unlike my friend here, the—the congressman. I—I do not believe that we have a right to tell other people that—women they can’t control their body. It’s a decision between them and their doctor. In my view and the Supreme Court, I’m not going to interfere with that.

With that, he managed to remind the audience that Supreme Court nominations were one of the great consequences of elections. Biden didn't laugh in this section, something that seemed to bother observers. Ryan, meanwhile, misrepresented what the Administration would allow, and pay for. Time was running out on this question, and what might have been a fuller discussion of a dozen different aspects—the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, which came up; Todd Akin, who did not—would have to wait. Abortion and religion got about six minutes. After a rich debate that was thoughtful about Afghanistan and Medicare and Romney’s “forty-seven per cent” problem, it didn’t feel like enough. But the difference was clear.

The Obama campaign seems to be making an effort to point out the gaps between Ryan’s position and Romney’s. But this does not make Romney’s position—which would not even allow a woman to get an abortion if her health, as opposed to her life, were in danger—a moderate one. The Romney-Ryan campaign has been attacking Obamacare by complaining about boards that would be involved. Who would a woman seeking an abortion have to stand in front of, and what would she have to prove?

Read John Cassidy on Biden’s strong showing and see our full coverage of the debates.

Photograph by Michael Reynolds/AP.