On Abortion

This was originally written in response to the Katie Couric interview with Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential election.
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I have a bone to pick with Katie Couric, and a lot of Pro-Choice people.

I should preface this by saying I am strongly pro-choice. But pro-choice advocates frequently bring up rape and incest when they're talking to pro-lifers. Doing this shows a profound misunderstanding of the views of pro-life people, and frankly, I'd like to shake any pro-lifers who said they were in favour of abortion in the case of rape or incest.

If you believe that a fetus is a human life and is entitled to the same rights and protections as any other human life, then that's it. There's no qualifying that. A human life doesn't become less valuable because the sex that conceived it was non-consensual. That is irrelevant. The pro-life response ought to be, "I'm sorry if you were raped, but that doesn't give you the right to murder."

I don’t understand why people bring up rape as some kind of trump-card in the abortion debate. Either you believe a fetus is human life with human rights, or you don't. If you don't, then abortions are okay, regardless of circumstance. If you do, then the only circumstance where not carrying a baby to term would be okay is if doing so endanger the life of the mother.