Gulp and Get Over It

That’s the advice  that Allison Benedikt of XX,  Slate’s  feminst blog, offers to women who find sex-selective abortion unpalatable:

No matter how many ultrasound pics get posted to Facebook, these are fetuses with female genitals or male genitals—not little girls and little boys. If pro-choicers object to aborting because of the sex of the fetus, aren’t we then saying that abortion is “murdering” girls? Aren’t we basically arguing that a fetus is not a blank slate but a future possibility? That is not the case to make if your goal is to protect abortion rights. Gulp for a second if you must, then get over it.

For years, the left has insisted that women’s equality is the reason why abortion must be enshrined in law as an inviolable right. Their point carried force because of the difficulties mothers face. Abortion, however undesirable, seemed a compassionate choice, and then it became a political right, a first condition of equality.

The dropped stitch in this line of thought, the thing so many missed, was the absolute and inviolable humanity of the unborn. If you miss that fact, the whole project unravels. You start out a feminist and end up defending the murder of unborn girls.