Reading Elliot DeVore’s opinion article on abortion rhetoric, I couldn’t help but be struck by his insistence that we should “[t]hink past the fetus” and consider just how complicated the issues surrounding the procedure really are. Our primary concern, DeVore seems to suggest, is the women. Women’s bodies, women’s choices, women’s prospects for the future. Anybody who restricts abortion, then, is seen as anti-woman — how can we, as a society, restrict a woman’s choices about her body and her future?

But is the woman the primary concern in abortion? Who exactly is hurt the most by the abortion procedure? Whose future is most critically in the balance? Whose body is in the most danger? Whose choice is really the most important here?

If a woman chooses abortion, she ends the future of another. She destroys the body of another. And she takes the choice of life away from another. If we forget the fetus, we forget the being most deeply affected by this “choice.” And if we could ask a fetus to choose — life or death — wouldn’t it make one choice every time … to live?

But let’s not mince words. By calling the unborn a “fetus,” we’re playing a lethal word game. We all know what a fetus really is. If you’re best friend gets pregnant and is happy about it, what does she call that little wiggling life inside of her? Does she say, “I can feel the fetus kicking”? What happy couple on this earth says of the life inside, “We’re debating names for our wad of tissue”? And what friend comes over and inquires, “Did the doctor say the fetus is healthy?”

No, a fetus is a baby, a real human being, and we only dehumanize it by calling it a fetus when we decide we don’t want it. Only when a baby is unwanted does it lose its humanity.

Then human life becomes worthless tissue. A blessed baby becomes a frightening curse. New life is viewed as a pernicious parasite. Our feelings decide if a very real human life is worth preserving, or if it should literally be thrown away with the garbage. Like the dehumanizing slurs used throughout history to devalue and destroy entire ethnicities, “fetus” dehumanizes and destroys human life even before the abortion procedure takes place. Except the unborn cannot protest their injustice.

The aborted have no choice but to die, with a silent scream.