How do you explain this, NARAL?
I normally don't think much about abortion, but recently, I've been thinking a lot about it. The impetus for this expenditure of brain cells has been some of the items reported in the nes as of late.

First, there is the Scott Peterson verdict. The State of California has seen fit to sentence Scott to death (okay, the jury did) for the murder of his wife and his unborn son. The court, probably because it was in the prosecutor's interest to think so, established that an unborn child is in fact a human being. We can wrangle over the infamous "24 week rule" and all sorts of other stuff, but in the end, an unborn child was considered a human being for the purposes of bringing criminal charges against his killer.

The second impetus was the case, plastered all over the news today, of a 23-year old Missouri woman, brutally murdered, who's killers took the time and effort to remove her unborn baby from her womb --- and then fled with it. As of 5:30 this evening, reports are circulating that the child has been found alive.

Which brings me to why I'm thinking of abortion.

To a supporter of abortion rights, neither COnnor Peterson nor this other unfortunate child from Missouri would be considered a person. Why? Because they hadn't been born yet. Yet the state, or more directly, the people of the state, do in fact consider the unborn as people, not as a mass of undelivered cells. The fact that a murder charge was brought in the death of one, and a multi-state manhunt was launched for the recovery of the other, pretty much proves it, if you ask me.

It's a known fact that surgery can be performed on a fetus in the womb, prior to it's birth, to correct brth defects. Gene therapy can be used on a developing baby before it takes it first breath. Doctors routinely prescribe medications to pregnan women on behalf of their unborn children. If this doesn't prove, once and for all, that the unborn are people, I don't know what does.

But NARAL, and others like them, don't see things that way. In their world, a fetus is an appendage until it is capable of sustaining the minimum life activities on it's own: breathing, crying, blinking, and for all we know, splitting atoms. To NARAL and it's ilk, a baby is not a baby until you can dress it in non-gender-specific clothing and send it off to a three-day seminar on the societal problems faced by Lesbian Six-toed Beastiality afficianados.

Why is this?

Part of it is ideology. This ideology states that women will always be releagted to teh scrap heap of history because the bearing of children and the responsibility of a family will always prevent her from reaching her fullest potential. This is the logic behind the "Equal Rights Amendment" and the (in-)famous "Glass Ceiling". Taking care of children is incompatible with the drive for success, whether in business, government, academia or NASACR, according to this bunch.

The second part is the old bugaboo of all liberal-inspired nonsense: the avoidance of personal responsibility. In this regard, abrotion, no matter how early, how late or how disgusting, is viewed merely as a means of birth control of the last resort. The other methods of birth control available (the pill, prophylactics, surgery, abstinance) are never ever discussed as anything but a male responsibility or as poor substitutes for abortion. With the exception of the pill, the responsibility for birth control should always land squarely upon the male, with a woman insisting on other methods merely as a failsafe. Until the failsafe fails. Then a woman must have the penultimate method available for dodging responsibility: killing her children. The poin tis not whether or not we're talking about a person or potential person, but whether the woman can avoid her responsibility and the attendant pain in the ass it entails.

We could argue semantics all day, which is what the proponents of unfettered abortion do, but when you come down to it, a baby is a baby, whether you choose to call it such or refer to it as a mere cluster of cells.

But when you read about things like this, it has to make you shake your head.