An abortion is a homicide.

In order to camouflage this stark, staring reality from the view of civilized, sentient beings made in the image of God, advocates fudge abortion's homicidal nature by emphasizing instead that it's first and foremost a solution to a problem.  Americans understand problem-solving.  Paint a problem in appalling enough terms -- a 10-year-old impregnated by her father! a woman who will die if forced to carry her baby to term! -- and sympathy for the mother tends to squeeze out close consideration of the other, graver problem created by the favored solution -- that is, the unborn child's problem of being marked out for death by its own mother.

As solutions to human problems go, you'd think any solution entailing homicide deserves the greatest scrutiny, not the least.  Capital punishment is homicide (not murder, but homicide).  Killing in wartime is homicide.  Western civilization sanctions both, provided neither is resorted to without first engaging in a searching inquiry of the circumstances and an adherence to strict rules.  Or not -- we don't do any such thing, as opponents of these kinds of killing would protest, which is why these actions should be outlawed.  Either way, the logic's not far different:  opponents of capital punishment object, among other reasons, that it's too easy to make a mistake, which is why innocent defendants lose their lives.  Anti-war activists object to a particular war because it was undertaken on insufficient grounds or is being fought by the wrong rules.  Or many object to all wars, regardless, because, they say, whatever the problem is, war is not the answer.

The point is this: it's the plainest truth in the world that it would be madness to sanction an activity whose principal byproduct is spilled human blood without due attention given to why and when such an activity can take place.

But we've been listening to that kind of madness for 40 years.  No argument for the abortion license has been more inflexible than that a woman's choice to terminate her unwanted child must remain shielded from all evaluation whatsoever.  Abortion advocate Michelle Goldberg recently explained her opposition to a ban on sex-selective abortion, even though she considers the practice "odious," by saying, "Banning it means allowing the government to decide what constitutes a legitimate reason for a woman to terminate a pregnancy, and forcing doctors to try to discern the motives of their patients."  Stated otherwise, killing unborn girls because they are girls may be "odious," but our current abortion regime forbids judging that choice by any criterion outside the absolute will of the mother -- which can never be questioned.  In spite of years of lectures about the sacred relationship between a woman and her doctor, even the abortionist is denied the competence to look into the reasons behind the "medical procedure" he is called upon to perform.  In order to remain truly free, a woman's choice can't have any strings attached tying it to any standards of law, morality, or even good manners.  To be genuine, the freedom to choose must be an exercise of arbitrary power. 

Rather than detracting from the logic that abortion is an act of pure will, the shockingly bad reasons women offer for terminating their children actually ensure that the freedom to choose is not being "burdened."  Like with the Queen of Hearts and her impulsive commands to behead her subjects, it's the very capriciousness of her decisions that proves that she wields sovereign authority. 

Abortion proponents view a woman's "choice" as extending beyond herself even to disposal of the life of a born child who has survived a botched abortion.  Obviously, a live infant can't be discounted any longer as just part of "a woman's body," nor be blamed, post partum, for being a threat to her life in childbirth.  None of that matters.  No circumstance can be allowed to nullify the woman's decree that the child be unmade.  Then-Illinois Senator Barack Obama followed this logic exactly when he opposed a state bill that required life-saving measures for such children by saying that "the decision concerning a baby should be left to a woman."  His objection to the bill was that it would "burden the original decision of the woman [to abort her child]."  Given the choice between a baby's life and a woman's decision, Senator Obama thinks it's no choice at all.

The fact is, if abortion is only a solution to a problem, then aborting little girls in favor of male babies is the reductio ad absurdum of that logic.  As long as pro-abortionists were able to convince large majorities that millions of mothers needed unrestricted abortion to save their own lives or to erase the memories of savage sexual assaults, pro-lifers were fighting an uphill battle, "forcing their morality" on these unfortunate victims of circumstance. 

But if it starts to get widely known that mothers are killing off their female offspring in significant numbers just because their regressive cultures place more value on boys than girls, then pro-abortion advocates will find themselves goosed against the pointy horns of their own hopeless dilemma.  A problem is a problem, after all, and abortion fixes all.  The pro-abortion left isn't going to be able to straddle contradictory public positions that the government must be allowed to decide what constitutes a legitimate reason for a woman to be terminated from her job, but can't be allowed to decide what constitutes a legitimate reason for an (unborn) woman to be terminated from her existence.

TR Clancy blogs once in a great while at Dearborn Underground.