Jessica Valenti classifies abortion as “a safe, legal and necessary medical procedure” in her recent post complaining that North Carolina does not want state funded facilities to perform abortions or teach how to perform abortions. Her argument completely leapfrogs the real point of the law and the discussion surrounding it—the immorality of abortion on demand.

 Ms. Valenti’s careful choice of language ignores the fact that an abortion kills a living human being, and humans know that killing a human being is not a trivial matter to be undertaken on a whim or simply for convenience. If killing a human, because the human is an inconvenience, were the right thing to do, the population of the US would be much smaller. In fact, the population is much smaller than it ought to be, because convenience killing of human beings has become common. The humans being killed are so small and vulnerable that the popular language refers to them as “a blob of cells,” or “the products of conception,” but regardless of that language, the fact is that abortion kills humans. In any other setting, if one human kills another, it is murder unless it is a court-ordered execution. Murder. Millions of tiny human beings are murdered in the US every day, and the process by which they are murdered is described as “a safe, legal and necessary medical procedure.”

 As long as one contemplates the procedure in such sterile language, it sounds harmless enough. It is just another medical procedure like removing a wart or sewing up a bad cut. A procedure. Doctors need to know all about all the possible medical procedures, don’t they?

 They do not.

 Students who are studying to become doctors never learn all the possible procedures, all the possible medications or even all the possible diagnoses. They learn the procedures, medications, and diagnoses that they are most likely to encounter a need for. A student doctor may be at the top of his class and know without error everything that has been presented to him during his medical education, but he will not even have been exposed to many esoteric procedures, medications, or diagnoses. A graduate of medical school who has completed his residency and is ready to open his own office still does not know all that there is to know about procedures, medications, or diagnoses.

North Carolina’s proposed law to ban state funded abortions in their entirety does not prevent doctors from learning the procedure for abortions. It simply prevents them from learning such a procedure at taxpayer expense. The taxpayers of North Carolina have spoken, and they say they do not want to pay for a procedure that kills defenseless, innocent, unborn human beings. They don’t want to pay for the removal of the cells of either an embryo or a fetus, because whether it is an embryo or a fetus, it is still a human being.

 North Carolina is within its rights to make this decision. There are very few situations in which a doctor must tell a pregnant woman that continuing a pregnancy is a threat to her own life. It does happen, but it is rare. It is a tragedy when a pregnant woman discovers that she might not even survive long enough into the pregnancy for the baby to be viable outside the womb after the mother dies. In such a situation, an abortion would be a reasonable choice. Death of someone is inevitable. Death of both mother and baby is possible, even likely. To be able to offer a safe abortion to a mother in that circumstance would be a blessing, even though the mother would mourn the death of her child regardless. When North Carolina makes a law that state-funded institutions will not conduct abortions, that law does not prevent a mother from obtaining the abortion elsewhere.

 Likewise, if state institutions do not teach abortion procedures (and by the way, the term should be plural, since there actually are multiple choices over the full term of a pregnancy), it does not mean that abortion procedures will not be taught. It does not even mean that medical students who attend state-funded schools of medicine in North Carolina cannot ever learn that procedure unless they learn it in a state-funded medical school. Private institutions will still do abortions and teach abortions if they choose. The taxpayers will not pay for it; private individuals who want and need the procedure will pay for it.

 Advocates of abortion on demand at all times in all places always act as if the opportunity for a mother to murder her baby will be completely lost if even one option for obtaining abortion is removed. Sadly, this fear is unfounded. If North Carolina’s state government no longer funds abortions, abortion will still be readily available to any woman in North Carolina who wants it.

I consider myself an advocate for the full humanity of every individual from conception to death, and with that in mind, I advocate for the full humanity of every woman who discovers that she is pregnant when she did not want to be. I am an adult woman myself, I know exactly how women become pregnant, and I know that there are many avenues for preventing pregnancy. I also know that we human beings commonly fail to use good judgment and self-control, usually when we need it most. If a woman is pregnant and does not want to be pregnant or rear a child, a solution does not involve murder. There are many married couples who want children and no pregnancy is happening for them. There are women who want very much to get pregnant, but they don’t. There are families who would welcome another child just because that is how they feel about life. A woman who is pregnant when it seems inconvenient or even disastrous need not commit murder in order to be free of it. She can give her baby to a family that will love and cherish the baby and rear that precious, very real human being to adulthood, God willing.

 It is painful to see a term that means “the murder of a defenseless, innocent, unborn human being, created and loved by God himself,” sterilized and sanitized into the definition that it is “a safe, legal and necessary medical procedure.” You would think it was a tetanus shot. Abortion kills a baby. There are no two ways about it. It is almost never “necessary” because it is extremely rare that the pregnancy itself is a threat to the life of the mother or that it requires a choice between the life of the mother and the life of the baby. Rare. Extremely rare. Only in those rare cases is it reasonable.

 There is no reason for abortion to be a common procedure, easier to obtain than an aspirin from the school nurse. A human being’s life is lost every time an abortion is successful. I applaud North Carolina for responding to the expectation of the citizens of that state that they will not be the ones to make it easy to murder defenseless, innocent, unborn human beings.