the conflicted language of pro-choicers

An excellent example from Marvin Olasky in his recent essay in World.

I wrote about this at length in my book-- on everything from the use of euphemisms for abortion to slips of the tongue by professing pro-choicers.

A pro-abortion culture requires eternal vigilance. Heresy can sneak through. The New York Times has for four decades maintained abortion orthodoxy, but an editor should be fired for not cutting out a tender dialogue in the next-to-last paragraph of a 7,500-word lead story in the newspaper six weeks ago.

Let me set the scene: A husband and a wife have had 15 failed pregnancies and in vitro fertilization non-starters. Author Alex Kuczynski, a fine writer, comes perilously close to falling off the cliff when she describes a "fetus" that didn't make it past 10 weeks as "a small dead baby"...

After getting a surrogate mother to bear them a child, her and her husband reflect on the method:

Here's the offending section: "My husband came out and sat next to me. He took my hand. 'You gave birth to our baby,' he told me. 'The doctors went in and took our baby out of you 10 months ago....It was like a C-section. They just went in and got him when he was very small.'"

Excuse me? Technically the husband is incorrect...But his poetic wisdom is solid: It was like a C-section bringing out a tiny baby. And if that's the way it is, then maybe we shouldn't be cavalier about killing small creatures for embryonic stem-cell research...

Then, Olasky neatly summarizes the debate (such as it is):

Two positions on abortion are logically consistent....the killing of small human beings, whether born or unborn, should be illegal. The other...is subjective: Small human beings dependent on others gain rights only as their needed protectors give them....

This is not to say that Americans can't come at least temporarily to an illogical middle position. Most Europeans have....

Subjectivity: Right now killing an unborn child with the consent of the mother is legal in all 50 states—but in at least 35 states it is murder if a father or anyone else kills that child without the mother's consent. In other words, our law is based on the idea that unborn children do not objectively have value unless they are recognized as children by their mothers. Do we really believe that?