The cost of compromise. . .

Everyone loves compromise.  If you can move something stalled along even an inch you have made progress, right?  Except that the compromises promoted in the cause of solving the abortion conflict are Trojan horses.  One of them is the so-called 15 week ban.  Abortion is banned after 15 weeks (lest you have forgotten that is nearly four months of a typical nine month pregnancy).  There is a problem here.  The compromise sounds tempting until you realize that 96% of abortions happen before 15 weeks!  In other words, you have given up everything to gain almost nothing.

So, adjust the number of weeks, right?  Why not simply ban abortion after 6 weeks (a month and a half of the pregnancy and well after it is obvious that the woman is pregnant).  The problem with this is that  44.8% of all abortions happen before the 6 weeks are up.  In other words, we are still allowing more than half of the babies in the womb to be killed at whim.  The issue is not about moving the line but whether or not we believe that the life in the womb of worthy of our protection?

It would be similar to saying you disapprove of murder if more than four people are killed but you might find your way around tolerating the murder of one or two people.  Either murder is wrong or it is not.  Either abortion is the taking of an innocent life or it is not.  How can you find a moderate position on an extreme issue?  It is like being on a diet that cuts down the number of desserts you have after every meal from 10 to 9 or from 10 to 5.  Are you going to lose weight?  Of course not!  But neither will you have to change your life all that much.  The right to life debate is not about how many children we can afford to kill or how many elderly or how many disabled, it is about the core value of life itself.  At some point we will need to recognize that this value is not won at the ballot box or at the court level but in the essential values that unite us as a nation.  Sadly, in that battle, we have not yet won any significant victory.