I've often told my wife that I don't believe the "pro-life" movement really believes that "abortion is murder", despite their strident rhetoric to the contrary. Consider the following fact: millions upon millions of abortions have been performed since Roe v. Wade. If the pro-lifers truly believed that a holocaust of this magnitude had occurred and was ongoing, they would be morally bound to mount huge and unstoppable protests at every abortion clinic in every community in this country. Moreover, no pro-lifer could view the United States as anything other than a monstrously evil state, surpassing totalitarian states in terms of cruelty and evil. No committed pro-life advocate could vote for any presidential candidate who didn't swear to end the holocaust immediately. No nuance of position would be possible. No patience with a president who sought to grow a culture of life over time. Only an immediate stop to the carnival of slaughter would be morally acceptible.
But this does not appear to be the case. It appears that pro-lifers are not truly as intense about fetuses they can't see as they would be about an adult they can see. And how do we know this? Terry Schiavo. Here is a full grown woman (or the body thereof), who in the mind of many pro-life activists, is being starved to death...and look at the results. Huge rallies, frequent attempts at civil disobedience, frequent threatened and actual terrorism...things that are notoriously absent from the anti-abortion movement, or are present only at the margins.
Why might this be? Why do so many pro-life activists feel more strongly about the death of one woman's apparently mindless body than the deaths of the millions of fetuses they claim to cherish? Perhaps because they, at root, do not value these fetuses as much as they claim. In the minds of most pro-life advocates, then, a fetus is still only a fetus. Sure, maybe they'll write a few letters to the editor on the issue, and maybe they'll call in to a radio show and complain about the issue, but to actually put themselves on the line over the issue...millions of fetuses just aren't worth that trouble.
It would be an interesting experiment to guage just how much cognitive dissonance pointing this out to an anti-abortion advocate might generate.