"A hidden holocaust"

That's the emotionally-charged phrase anti-choice fanatics often use to describe terminating a pregnancy.

Well, here's a real abortion-related hidden holocaust; I wonder how they feel about this one.

Nearly 70,000 women, almost half of them in Asia, die from unsafe abortions each year despite government pledges made a decade ago to improve human rights and reproductive health, researchers said Wednesday. ...

"Unsafe abortion poses a serious threat to the health and lives of women all around the world, not just in Asia," Elizabeth Maguire, president of the Ipas group which works to protect women from unsafe abortions, told Reuters. ...

"We have figures that 40 women every minute undergo an unsafe abortion and 200 are dying every day. The real message is that these deaths and disabilities from unsafe abortion are preventable," Maguire said. ...

According to the report, Asia accounts for 55 percent of the world's unsafe abortions, the highest of any region, with about 10.5 million in 2000, followed by Africa with 4.2 million unsafe abortions and Latin America and the Caribbean with 3.7 million. ...

Poor, unmarried women, widows, adolescents and divorcees are the least likely to have access to safe abortions.

I recall some years ago talking with a friend who was against abortion but fortunately not a nut case on the subject. While acknowledging that a fetus is not the same as a human life because of it's dependence on the mother for survival, he argued that it had to be considered more than a part of the mother and therefore with some rights because it was "a potential human life."

I replied by asking if a potential human life should be able to overrule the choices of an existing human life. He admitted that while abortion still made him uncomfortable, he had no answer to that.

On the other hand, we do know what the fanatics would say and what they would say about the women who die. They would say yes, the fetus overrules the mother, that once you get pregnant you lose all control over your own life. And they would probably say that those who die in unsafe abortions have only themselves to blame for getting pregnant in the first place; some would probably declare it was fitting punishment for the "crime" of "murdering their baby."

There are good, decent people who for whatever combination of religious and ethical beliefs oppose abortion. I know there are, because I have known some. I do not agree with them but neither do I doubt their sincerity or, again, their basic decency. Those among them who work on the issue do it via a combination of moral persuasion, advocacy of well-funded public pre- and neonatal services, and minimizing the call for abortions through sex education and wide availability of birth control. They do not call for criminalizing abortions or bringing the weight of the state down on those who have them or perform them.

But they do not speak for the movement of which they are part and they really need to be careful about who are their "associates." Because "pro-life" really does not fit those people.