Kim Learnard’s scenario of women having “private conversations with their doctors” is typical of the rhetorical sleight of hand that we get from the pro-choice side.

To wit, what exactly ARE the women and doctors talking about? They’re not talking about a cancer treatment or any sort of medical procedure designed to heal or prolong human life.

No. They’re talking about the opposite. They’re talking about ending a human life before it has fully gestated.

This is not healing. This is not prolonging human life. It is extinguishing it.

And that’s the threat Josh Bonner was addressing in his metaphor: that lives are going to be lost if someone doesn’t take steps to save them.

Ms. Learnard makes the emotionally compelling argument that it is only a woman and her doctor who can be entrusted with the decision about whether to abort. We are a country that values liberty and rights and this notion appeals to us strongly.

However, we are also a country that seeks to protect the innocent and the weak, and which guarantees the “right to LIFE, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in its founding document.

Sometimes, the right for an individual to do what she wants conflicts with another individual’s right to live. An unborn child is indeed an individual human being, after all. Science tells us so.

Just as we decided some 160 years ago that slaveholders did not in fact have the right to enslave other human beings, we on the pro-life side say that today, we should not grant anyone — women, men, doctors, politicians — the right to deny the right to life of any innocent human being, no matter where they are in their development.

We extend this protection to the unborn, the born and vulnerable (we still don’t allow infanticide, for the most part), the very sick, and the aged (though, with the continued rise of the euthanasia movement, that right is eroding).

And in that hypothetical conversation between a woman and her doctor, do you really believe they are discussing the ontological reality of that fetus in her womb, that it is a human being (not an organ, not an anonymous “part of her body,” not a blob of tissue) and that the procedure to destroy that human being is horrific to the extreme?

I think not. That’s because, frankly, the pro-choice side so very rarely acknowledges the reality of this issue and instead seeks to hide it behind a curtain of a highly selective view of rights and lies about the supposed desire of pro-lifers to deny women all rights if they lack this one.

I would instead challenge our country to have these “conversations” focus on how to help the pregnant woman deal with her very difficult situation, on how to encourage greater responsibility among young (and not so young) people when it comes to exercising their gift of sexuality, on how to ensure that men are held accountable for the children they conceive, and on how we as a society should strive to solve such problems not through violence and death, but through love and true compassion.

Trey Hoffman

Peachtree City, Ga.