Mind you, I don't expect her to say most people who've had their umbilical cords severed, and perhaps their birth certificates printed, have done anything to deserve someone else offing them. Maybe she and other pro-lifers understand that to be true, though, deep within the recesses of their emotionally-driven subconsciouses. Perhaps to them, fetuses curled defenselessly into a ball are cuter, and thereby subconsciously more worth protecting, than starving children and adults in distant countries without almost any body fat left, or homeless drug addicts. Maybe some of them would rather not defend the lives of people with whom they wouldn't ordinarily associate, and hence concentrate their otherwise well-intentioned energy on fetuses.

 

Returning to the point made in the second sentence of this entry, very often my mom, my history teacher or maybe my principal (all women, by nothing but coincidence--I've heard this come from men too) will describe something bad, or something they perceive as bad, and finish their description with "...like abortion, for example" or otherwise place the two offending acts in the same category. Some notable inductees into this category have been condoms, divorce, premarital sex and the gay rights movement.

 

For all I know, they may be helping to trivialize abortion by making it the Worst Thing Ever and discussing it so often. Even if triviality hasn't taken their minds hostage, though, the way they won't stop talking about it still doesn't strike a good chord with me. I guess that's because I've literally never heard any of them speak a disapproving word about the President's pre-emptive strike in Iraq based on faulty intelligence. Maybe I should ask them if one type of murder is less horrible than another, and see what they say.