If you really–as in really, truly–believe abortion is murder how could so many pro-life supporters reduce pregnancy prevention to abstinence-only programs? If abortion is murder then any and all means are necessary to prevent potential pregnancy and subsequent abortions. To be pro-life and abstinence-only is to make your sexual ethic more important that all those aborted babies. Rather than handing out condoms you are willing to live with more abortions.

Just one more way, added to Henry’s list, that shows the moral inconsistencies of the pro-life movement.

Henry, yours imho, is triangulation at its best.

First, if pro-life advocates really believe that abortion is “murder” then the killing of Dr. Tiller seems perfectly justified, equivalent to trying to assassinate Hitler. So it’s morally inconsistent for pro-life people to shy away from endorsing the Tiller killing. If you are pro-life you are morally culpable if you don’t shoot abortion doctors. That is, unless, one is a committed pacifist, rejecting all violence. But most pro-life people at my church are not pacifists. In short, if you wanted to be a morally consistent pro-life person you either 1) Must acknowledge that it is your moral duty to shoot abortion doctors and act on that belief (or be a coward and hypocrite), or 2) Be a committed pacifist across the board.

Second, most pro-life people contend that “life” begins at conception. If so then late term abortions are morally equivalent to first trimester abortions. But the pro-life camp consistently targets late term abortionists (like Dr. Tiller) for their acute ire and violence. But this uneven rage toward late term abortions tacitly endorses the logic of Roe v. Wade, that the moral status of the fetus isn’t a binary issue but is continuous and increasing across the trimesters. In short, the killing of Dr. Tiller, as a late term abortion provider, is an illustration of how, at a tacit level, most pro-life supporters acknowledge the logic of Roe v. Wade.

Finally, most pro-life supporters are Republicans and would likely attend no tax “tea parties.” In short, they are demanding millions of babies to be born each year while failing to vote for social policies that would support those babies and their mothers. Pro-life policy creates acute, real-world economic pressures, affecting not only the mother’s choice but the well-being of the child after birth. The only morally consistent policy position is to be a pro-life Democrat where one is both voting for life and social policies aimed at aiding mothers and children in the lowest economic brackets after pro-life policies have been implemented.

The sum of the matter: Most pro-life people I know at church are morally confused on multiple different levels.

I watched it all on the evening news and believed (ever so naively) that Walter Cronkite and the rest of national news anchors were objectively reporting the news. We smoked marijuana as often as we could and predicted it would be legal in five years at the most. The next summer I hitched hiked and hopped freight trains around the country from Abilene to northern New Mexico communes to California and back again. I gotta admit I wasn’t your typical ACC boy then nor now. I could not have cared less about sports as there were momentous intellects currents afloat and “the times, they were a changin”

What fantastic visions we claimed all the while believing that man was basically good and that, given enough time, we would solve all our problems. You see in the CofC I was taught that man was basically good and that God had done his part and now we just needed to do our part.

Thirty years later I would visit Toul Sleng prison – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng – and then walk the killing fields and kick at the dirt under the tree where they tossed the babies in the air and bayoneted them on the way down before raping the mother. I picked up a human tooth from the dirt and keep it in one of those little velvet boxes that engagement rings come in. At the end of that day I retired to the Foreign Correspondents Club overlooking the Mekong river to drink enough to become less sober after the day’s sight seeing. I still don’t know what to do with the tooth – whether to bury it or cremate it – but I keep it and show it to people that tell me mankind is basically good.

What a difference a few years makes in one’s perspective.