William Saletan of Slate attempts to make the case that the pro-life community isn’t living up to our rhetoric. If we really believed the unborn and the born have equal standing, then we should be like Scott Roeder, stopping with deadly force the slaughtering of babies.

If a doctor in Kansas were butchering hundreds of old or disabled people, and legal authorities failed to intervene, I doubt most members of the National Right to Life Committee would stand by waiting for “educational and legislative activities” to stop him. Somebody would use force.
The reason these pro-life groups have held their fire, both rhetorically and literally, is that they don’t really equate fetuses with old or disabled people. They oppose abortion, as most of us do. But they don’t treat abortionists the way they’d treat mass murderers of the old or disabled. And this self-restraint can’t simply be chalked up to nonviolence or respect for the law. Look up the bills these organizations have written, pushed, or passed to restrict abortions. I challenge you to find a single bill that treats a woman who procures an abortion as a murderer. They don’t even propose that she go to jail.

Of course this is a false dilemma. Just because you believe that abortion is murder, doesn’t mean that you’d start killing doctors to stop it. It’s not our place to dispense justice, that role belongs to the government. I’m not a vigilante and would never become one because that just makes me as contemptible as the abortionist I’m condemning, it makes me a murderer and will put me on the wrong side of the law. I would be the one going to jail and deservedly so.
There may come a day when we start “euthanizing” the elderly because we can’t afford their operations or procedures (don’t mock, it’s already happening in the UK, they just don’t call it that) and when they start doing it, I have no intention of taking up a gun and shooting the bureaucrat who denies them their operation. I would do the same thing that I do now, elect legislators who promise to end the procedure by whatever means they can do it.
As to treating the mother as a criminal, we have no intention of doing that, we are more interested in prosecuting the one who is actually doing the killing. If we want to show mercy to the mother, then why can’t we? Because the pro-abortion side finds it logically inconsistent? Yeah, like that would bother us. And really, who are they to charge us with being logically inconsistent? It’s like the pot calling the kettle black. It is beyond any doubt that if the pregnancy were not terminated, the mother would give birth to a human baby. An abortion terminates life.