Since my foray into column writing began I have been waiting to take on some of the more controversial societal issues. However, after Sept. 11, most everything in the government (not to mention the news media) has been focused on terrorism and the war effort, and for good reason. Though there has been some attention to the issue of legality of abortions with respect to the recent push to classify the fetus as an unborn child. In other words – can open, worms everywhere.

The reaction of the abortion rights activists has been quite interesting – there’s nothing like a little paranoia to get people talking. I understand how the classification of the fetus as an unborn child could be a minor problem to Roe v. Wade. After all, there is clearly no relationship between pregnancy and babies/children. And obviously it’s wrong to try to provide health care for expectant mothers by allowing them to claim fetuses as unborn children.

As far as I’m concerned, the abortion situation is one of the most clear-cut cases of political correctness gone crazy. Actually, I think gone stupid would be a more appropriate expression. It’s unbelievable that we are so far gone, fallen so deep into the abyss of political correctness that we can’t just call a spade what it is because we’re afraid of being asked to help with the digging. Heaven forbid low-income women should actually do an outrageous thing like claiming their unborn children as unborn children; all so that abortions can remain legal.

Abortion is a very controversial issue in our society, and like all such issues, extreme cases are often used in the argument. Its proponents often refer to cases of rape and incest as cases where abortion is justified. But multiple surveys have shown that the majority of women state other reasons for wanting to “terminate.” Funny how we’ve reduced the killing of an unborn child to something that sounds more at home in an Arnold Schwarznegger movie.

Anyhow, most of these women cite other reasons; most often used is that said pregnant woman is not ready for the changes that having the child would bring. Why wouldn’t such people just give the child up for adoption? Well, then you’d be asking them to undergo the great inconvenience of carrying the child for nine months, and of course we can’t have that.

Other common reasons for wanting abortions include inability to afford the child, not wanting to be a single parent, not wanting friends/family to know about the pregnancy or being too young or immature to have a baby. The only thing these reasons have in common is the rampant and unmitigated irresponsibility they signify. It is a good example of how much our lives are based on escaping the results of our actions, a perfectly human trait. But when dodging responsibility means killing a human being, born or not, that clearly reeks of something. And the fragrance I perceive is not Tahitian Vanilla.

While I still lean toward not accepting rape and incest as a reason, I acknowledge it is a very complex issue. For a person who has gone through something as traumatic as those, I’m just as quick to feel sympathetic as the next guy. But I still do not believe the solution is to kill the baby and hope that it solves the problem. Most accounts appear to depict the effects of rape and/or incest as events that leave indelible scars on the victim’s psyche. Now I’m no mathematician, but I think it’s safe to say that the nine months it would take to carry and deliver a baby is a far smaller amount than the number of months in a lifetime. After that, adoption is always an alternative. Far be it from me to suggest that rape and incest do not leave serious psychological wounds, but I cannot accept abortion as helpful therapy. Killing the child is just a front to disguise the true problem – another interesting statement on how our society operates. It also amounts to punishing an unborn child for someone else’s crime. In a society where we still argue over the death penalty for Tim McVeigh, isn’t that intriguing?

Another contentious issue in the abortion debate is when human life begins. In modern medical practice, an important criterion for determining death is a flat EEG (electroencephalograph), signifying the cessation of brain activity. So, logically it should follow that the onset of brain wave activity might help to determine life. Well it just so happens that individual brain waves are detected in the fetus in 40-43 days. By that fact alone, a majority of abortions are clearly the taking of a human life, even in the first trimester. And interestingly enough, the excuse used for abortions in the first trimester is the lack of fetal movement in that early stage of pregnancy. I guess we ought to start killing off coma patients and anyone else who’s immobile or unconscious.

While the medical findings mentioned above may not be absolute, they provide an element of doubt as to when life begins that is impossible to ignore. For something as serious as the determination of whether or not a life is being taken, I believe that the burden of proof lies with the pro-choice activists. Near as I can tell, they have still failed to provide any indisputable proof to justify their views.

I also believe that to truly be “pro-choice,” the right to choose should reflect everyone involved, not just the parties that our newfound pan-societal feminism instructs us to recognize.

The father should have a choice, because if you’re going to make laws that require fathers to provide child support, then the acknowledgement of the significance of the father should not be selective by the time at which said significance begins. And while we’re at it, we might give a little thought to whether or not the child gets a choice to live.

Like it or not, abortion boiled down to its essence, without it’s proponents’ medical euphe-misms and self gratifying rhetoric, is murder, plain and simple. We can come up with whatever excuses we like in order to make ourselves feel better about it, but the truth remains true.

Reality is kind of stubborn like that.

Emeka Anyanwu is a senior in electrical engineering from Ames.