NEW PROCEDURE MAY SPUR ABORTIONS

A new abortion technique allows women to end a pregnancy just days after conception and before they've even missed a menstrual period. The new method is offered at Planned Parenthood Federation affiliates across the country.

The procedure, which can take as little as two minutes, "uses a hand-held syringe that avoids the noise and cost of the vacuum pump used for other abortions," according to a news story describing it. This chilling description marks a departure from the usually sanitized accounts of what too many in the mainstream media refer to, without a hint of irony, as "reproductive rights."

As with most developments, this will mean different things to different people. For pro-lifers, here's Laura Echevarria of the National Right to Life Committee: "Scientifically speaking, there's no difference between a fertilized egg and what you have three weeks later. Saying it's OK to kill it in the early stages because you're more comfortable with that is completely arbitrary."

While logic leads many to this conclusion, the problem pro-lifers face is that this view commands nowhere near a majority of Americans. Of most Americans it can be said that they are deeply conflicted on abortion, regarding it as an evil but clearly less of one early in gestation than later. This is shown again and again, not just in public opinion surveys but also in the riveting national debate over outlawing late-term, so-called partial-birth abortions. Public opinion overwhelmingly backs sanctions against such late-term procedures, and rightly so.

It is one of the most interesting wrinkles in the long-running abortion debate that medical innovations such as ultrasound techniques have bolstered the pro-life cause. Mothers and fathers turn out to less willing to abort after they've seen their tiny unborn kicking and sucking a thumb, after they've seen and heard the heartbeat. This new procedure may be a departure from that trend, one that actually encourages early abortions even before the miracle of ultrasound can work its wonder in softening hearts toward the unborn.

One has the sense that, in the fullness of God's time, a great story is being written, with awesome implications for the meaning of human life. It is in this context of humility that reflective observers mull the meaning of this latest "advance" in "reproductive rights."