After Abortion notes the continuing conversation at Slate between abortion-rights advocates about whether or not abortion should be morally evaluated.

Francis Kissling has entered the fray:

The major difficulty I see for those of us who are strong advocates of a framework for legal abortions that stresses near-absolutism for women as decision makers (a position I agree with) is that it rarely acknowledges or allows room for the public consequences of such a policy. Pregnancy and child birth are private acts with public consequences. The old way of looking at this was the population control impulse – we don’t want to let women decide to have as many children as they want because we as a society end up absorbing the consequences. A newer dimension is genuine public concern about the relationship between abortion and building a society in which many forms of life are valued – fetuses, animals, nature, This concern emerges from a fear that prochoice advocates, who constantly hammer away about the "who" of abortion, may be distancing themselves from the "what" of abortion in a way that devalues all human life.

While I think there is more work to be done on Will’s statement that "It is bad to kill a fetus", he does a service by putting it out there so boldly. There are many problems with the word "bad" and how it is heard. A more nuanced way of saying this is that the act of abortion is not a moral good. Things that are not moral goods are not necessarily immoral or bad. And they may, as is the case with abortion, be often justifiable and almost always have positive outcomes.