We are faced with troubling conflicts of both a moral and a spiritual nature as it relates to abortion. At the same time, those who are adamant about their respective positions continue to press the issue as a legal one.

          Daily, the question of "pro-life" versus "pro-choice" is an agitating influence. Murder and mayhem follow these two points of view. Let me say at the outset that I am anti-abortion. That is not to say that I am pro-life in the context of today's media. I do not bomb abortion centers. I would not injure an abortion doctor. I do not condemn women who chose to abort their babies. To be truthful, I WOULD condemn a few but that is by personal conviction and I would never seek to harm them. I have very dear friends whom I have not quit loving simply because they made a decision that had life and death consequences. My problem with the issue is the double standard we hold.

          As an EMT for the State of Oregon, I once responded to the house of a young mother who had "miscarried" and was bleeding heavily. Upon arrival I discovered that the woman had used a knitting needle to terminate her own pregnancy so that it would not interfere with her chosen life. I scooped her baby from the toilet since she had been unsuccessful in flushing it away and it was taken to the hospital along with the mother. The mother was arrested and her remaining children removed from her care by the State.

          Here is the conflict. If she had gone to an abortion clinic and a doctor had ended her pregnancy, it would have had the approval of the state and her peers. No one would have been arrested and she might still have her other children. So what is the difference? Either we approve of abortion or we do not. Period.

          How is it that, if abortions are approved, we can take exception to the way they are done? If we deem it a medical procedure and then charge the mother with practicing medicine without a license, aren't we stretching the credibility a bit far? When my daughter broke her finger, we set it and it healed nicely. There was no question of practicing medicine without proper authority. The same is true of removing splinters from my children's feet or foreign particles from their eyes. People are not denied treatment for such ailments in emergency rooms. These services, therefore, are deemed medical treatment by the medical community. Where do we draw the lines?

          Obviously we cannot draw the line for abortions as the point of taking another life for such a claim would charge that unborn babies HAVE life and doctors would be committing murder. Since we chose to declare that unborn children do not yet have life than how can we hold a woman accountable for ending her own pregnancy?

          Is it that she tried to dispose of the baby by flushing it down the toilet and into her own septic tank? Hospitals routinely incinerate such unwanted babies. Is there a difference in the disposal of the garbage?

          I do not wish to explore hypothetical questions regarding rape, incest and women who abandon third trimester miscarried babies because those, which admittedly do happen, are only a minuscule percentage of the statistics. I would rather have you ponder this double standard we have set and ask yourself why one is wrong and the other is not. It seems very logical to me to say that either both are right or both are wrong. It follows that if one method is wrong, the other is wrong also.