People who equate a small collection of cells with a baby
evidence a very modern world view, one which places an abstraction in front of
concrete reality.  This elevation of abstraction is a defining feature of the modern world, one taking many forms.

Modern science is modernity’s most successful expression of this principle.  But in contrast to modern science, which is pretty open as to what emerges from its processes so long as it can be measured and predicted, ‘pro-life’ forms of the modern mind more closely resemble the mental outlook of the great secular ideologies that have killed so many during the Twentieth Century.  They elevate as supreme an abstract definition of a tiny part of possible
abstractions applying to the world as obviously the “real” distinction.  Unlike science, the assume their conclusion in the beginning and remove it from examination.

This attitude is on
the same level as those Marxists who believe class consciousness is more real
than human individuality, and so when they had the power, sacrificed millions with the “wrong
consciousness” to their abstraction of a new communist man.  The Nazis did a
similar thing with Aryan Man, and so sacrificed millions more to their own abstraction.  The ideal of scientific planning of society used similar thinking, evaluating people as “resources” subordinated to a grand abstract task.   Despite all their talk of “freedom,” Libertarians often do the same, sacrificing real human 
beings to “the market” and “voluntary contract,” abstractions removed from the complexity of real people trying to make it in a complex world. Their ideal abstraction is the “satisfied consumer” which is a pitiful fragment of the complexity of a full human being.

In all these cases, and in so very many more, a living
breathing caring being is rendered valueless when put up against a mental
construct.  ‘Its’ always trump ‘Thous’, so long as it is the right kind of ‘It’.  This is the attitude behind the collective autism that is modern society in its purest form.

In other words, the “pro-life” crowd shares a mental illness
which I believe applies to the modern world view in general, and they have it
very virulently. A collection of cells invisible to the naked eye is as human as you or I, and being “innocent,” for many of these fanatics its well-being trumps the life of the mother.  With a different set of beliefs this attitude leads to the Red Guard, the Waffen SS, Taliban and Al Qaeda.  Similar kinds of excesses are implicit with the most radical “pro-lifers” awaiting only the opportunity and power to manifest.

The cure for the modern disease is what religious traditions world wide refer to with words
like love, care, and compassion. 
What these words have in common is a concern with the concrete instance,
with beings here and now as trumping the Big Abstractions or turbulent emotions.  

When a religion tears itself away from
this base and elevates an abstraction as its authority it becomes a force
defending and promoting death and destruction because living reality in all its
change, variety, complexity, and beauty never resembles a Great Abstraction,
and so can and will be sacrificed to it, if its followers have the power to do so.

My argument would actually once have been called a conservative position, back when
conservatism meant something other than a nihilistic worship of power.