So is this partial birth abortion legislation in the United States merely outlawing a rare and almost entirely unnecessary procedure, or is it the first stage in an all-out attack on abortion rights in general? Clearly it is the latter, but that doesn't really bother me. Pro-choice activists who talk about Roe vs. Wade as if it were the Emancipation Proclamation bother me. I'm pro-choice myself, but these people have to face facts: abortion is not something to celebrate. I can't even figure out how it's not murder.

"I feel that no one has the right to tell you how to live your life, and what you can and cannot do to your body," writes an unnamed correspondent on prochoice.org, the National Abortion Federation's website. In a nutshell, that seems to be the foundation for most peoples' belief in a woman's right to choose. She continues: "A baby is a part of you, which leaves the decision of its life in your hands. If you do not feel that you are able to support this new life," she concludes, "then you should have the right not to do so."

Now hold the phone, Mabel. If a fetus were a part of a woman in the way that a pinkie finger is part of a woman, then I would agree. The state has no business telling men or women what to do with their pinkie fingers. But a fetus is not like a pinkie finger in several ways. A pinkie finger is not co-produced by a member of the opposite sex. A pinkie finger cannot grow up and become a middle finger, or an arm, or a successful recording artist. Once she acknowledges that a fetus is a "new life," her "my body, my decision" argument becomes rather problematic.

We westerners have nearly absolute dominion over our own bodies — no law prohibits us from amputating our pinkie fingers with rusty butter knives, for instance — but we are forbidden by law to kill ourselves, just as we are forbidden to kill others. Our society places the ultimate importance on the preservation of life, in the case of suicide even at the expense of personal freedom. How can we afford a woman the right to extinguish a "new life" when we do not even afford her the right to extinguish her own? Abortion may not be murder, and it certainly isn't suicide, but morally it must lie somewhere between the two, and not beyond.

Nobody likes abortion. Nearly everyone agrees that it's an ugly, unfortunate thing. Most mainstream pro-choicers get to sleep at night by drawing a line of acceptability somewhere between an abortion early in the pregnancy and one, say, in the 36th week. Some use the point at which the baby could survive outside the womb as the dividing line — before that it's a pinkie finger, in other words, and afterwards it's a life. Amputation versus murder.

Visually and emotionally I can, of course, see these differences. Morally I see none. Leave a six-day-old baby alone in a closet and it will quickly die, its dependence on its mother only infinitesimally diminished by its freedom from the womb. Society does not punish infanticide less severely than it does the murder of old-age pensioners. From what, then, derives its distinction between the termination of an embryo and that of a fully formed fetus on the brink of healthy delivery?

Necessity is what. "If [anti-abortion protestors] feel so strongly against abortions, then why aren't they adopting all the children who have been abandoned by their parents, or the children who have been left to die in garbage cans?" These are the words of another unnamed correspondent, and there's no comeback to that. There were 105,427 "therapeutic abortions" in Canada in the year 2000. That's 32.2 abortions for every 100 live births! The sad truth is that if we didn't have abortion we'd be totally screwed, so forcing the practice into back alleys and basements would be as counterproductive as it would be barbaric.

All but a tiny minority of women who have abortions have agonized over it, weighed the pros against the cons as objectively as they could and come to a very difficult decision. I cannot even imagine the guilt and doubt they must feel both before and after the fact, but let's be clear — they should feel guilt and doubt, and, if the father was complicit in the decision, he should share equally in those feelings (impossible, I realize, since only the mother can actually consent to the procedure). 

I am pro-choice not because I believe a woman should have an absolute right to terminate her pregnancy — until I can discern that line of acceptability somewhere between conception and delivery I will remain uncomfortably perched upon a fence. I am pro-choice because society is totally unprepared to face the alternatives; and given that grim reality, who but the mother herself should decide whether her baby, this new life, lives or dies?