Editor's note. Computer snafu's held this up. I still would like to read comments from readers. The address is daveandrusko@hotmail.com

On Thursday we talked about the arduous journey that is educating 300 million Americans about abortion. Admittedly slow going, nonetheless if you look around there is increasing evidence we've made more progress than we may realize.

Often the most telling sign of breakthrough comes when abortion supporters are forced (always begrudgingly) to grapple with the relentless logic of "choice." I offer as one representative example, "Genetic Testing + Abortion = ???," which appeared in the New York Times May 13. [www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/weekinreview/13harm.html]

Kirsten Moore is described as the "president of the pro-choice Reproductive Health Technologies Project." She told reporter Amy Harmon "that when members of her staff recently discussed whether to recommend that any prenatal tests be banned, they found it impossible to draw a line -- even at sex selection, which almost all found morally repugnant. 'We all had our own zones of discomfort but still couldn't quite bring ourselves to say, 'Here's the line, firm and clear' because that is the core of the pro-choice philosophy," she said. 'You can never make that decision for someone else.'"

"Zones of discomfort." Hold that thought.

To be sure there is plenty of the usual hand-wringing/meaningless drivel--sound and fury signifying nothing. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the real dilemma for some supporters of abortion when they are faced with the decidedly unprogressive prospect of aborting a child, particularly when the child is the "wrong" sex or diagnosed with trivial anomalies.

Consider 32-year-old SarahLynn Lester, who "considers herself a supporter of abortion rights," Harmon writes. "She gives money to the National Abortion Rights Action League and volunteers for Planned Parenthood. But as a woman who continued a pregnancy after learning that her child would have Down syndrome, she also has beliefs about the ethics of choosing, or not choosing, certain kinds of children.

"'I thought it would be morally wrong to have an abortion for a child that had a genetic disability," said Ms. Lester, a marketing manager in St. Louis."

Harmon does a nice job of pointing out (as the poll we talked about Thursday also notes) that there is majority support for an abortion "if there is a strong chance of a serious defect in the baby." The inherent inhumanity (as one pro-abortionist once famously put it) of "recycling" the "defective" baby is compounded by the bizarre conflict that arises when women exercise the unlimited abortion right to abort unborn women.

There is less attention paid in Harmon's story to that gigantic inconsistency than to the more general problem of the "specter of fetuses" being "selectively targeted for elimination"--those who has been diagnosed with "conditions that do not involve serious disabilities, childhood diseases or death." It's one thing if "traditional anti-abortion advocates, from conservative politicians to Pope Benedict" talk about this as a "subtle form of eugenics." Nothing new there.

But there is also, Harmon writes, the potential to "disturb solid supporters of abortion rights" when the targeted child has been diagnosed with what is euphemistically described as "less serious conditions."

Worse yet there is another "specter" looming: abortion rights opponents (us) "hijacking the discussion" if pro-abortionists (as one told Harmon) can't "agree on a set of principles without giving up the fight for reproductive rights."

On the one hand, they understand that this "so buys into this consumer perspective on our children" (as "abortion rights supporter" Marsha Saxton, a senior researcher at the World Institute on Disability, tells Harmon). But on the other hand they miss altogether that this is no different than aborting "flawless" children. In both cases, these little ones are treated as things--disposable commodities--rather than human beings.

An article very much worth reading. [www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/weekinreview/13harm.html]

If you have any comments or questions, please write Dave Andrusko at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.