If abortion clinics were corporate offices, every news show, including those on Fox, would be calling the bombings and murders of workers acts of terrorism against the American way of life. If people ran around screaming that Bush and Cheney are murderers and calling for laws making false claims for war illegal, they'd be arrested or marginalized as nut jobs. The rhetoric of the anti-choice movement - forget the pro-life misnomer - is intentionally inflammatory, intentionally charged so that it calls attention to its claim to the high moral ground, so that it calls for a guerrilla war on abortion providers.

That most of the anti-choice terrorism is carried out by men indicates how threatened the anti-choice movement is by women making choices for themselves. Occasionally women partner with men to bomb clinics, but the majority of bombings and all the shootings were committed by men. And yet, despite this terrifying history of violence and anti-life actions, news organizations continue to miss the basic premise of the anti-choice vigilantes: women lack the moral fiber and intellectual capacity to make decisions according to their own needs and values.

They also miss the other vital element to the anti-choice movement, that it's also anti-sex. How a group that claims to be so fond of babies can villify birth control, pre-natal care, and public funding for programs for low income families is beyond me, but it does just that.

It does that because the truth is providing safe, legal abortions to those who want them IS the middle ground. That premise goes with providing good quality health care to all our citizens. That middle ground also recognizes that while men are required to become pregnant, it is not their bodies that do the work, that take the physical and emotional stress and consequences of term pregnancy or terminating pregnancy.

I wonder how many news organizations will challenge the "pro-life" movement on their moniker. Not many, I imagine, because it was the news organizations that bought into the anti-choice movement's PR term in the first place.

Abortion, which has existed in one form or another as long as conception, has been successfully twisted into a political issue. Abortion became illegal at the same time birth control became available and women were demanding civil rights. Men, who were in charge then and who remain in charge of most of our political and medical institutions, have determined that abortion, alone among other procedures, is evil.

By declaring, without evidence, that embryos are human beings allows abortion to transform from private medical consultation to public derision. Embryos are not, as stem cell research and the simple biological logic of miscarriage and various inherent deformities shows, always going to flower into human beings. Linking abstractions like innocence and purity into the conversation distracts everyone from the basic issue that abortion exists, regardless of legality.

No other medical procedure, including more complex and morally ambiguous ones like brain surgery or transplants, gets the attention or is subject to public judgment. No other group, women, has been singled out as incapable of making difficult moral and physical choices. No one allows that being pro-choice, you can have an abortion if you choose to, is the political middle ground.

While everyone is raising the scarecrow boogeyman of socialized medicine, we've overlooked how corporatized medicine has become. Hospitals and medical groups, pharmaceutical companies and medical supply companies, insurers and lawyers determine everything from prices to policies. Health care is an industry, not a right. We, the patients, are not being served, except on a platter to for-profit companies.

The result is that medical schools, like hospitals and doctors and almost everything else we use, bows to the pressure of profitability. If hospitals were serving the public, they wouldn't be for-profit institutions. If medical school was about teaching medicine and how to practice health care, it wouldn't be a four year cram session, but a longer, more cooperative, continual learning process. Procedures, like abortion, would be taught within the context of how the body works.

Only abortion has been politicized. Medical students still learn to do all sorts of surgeries that beg moral questions. Medicine is more often about value judgments, rather than moral mandates.

If this country valued learning, valued health care, we would be providing for students the way they do in Europe, giving them an education, including room and board, for those who are genuinely interested and talented. We wouldn't be confusing individual morals with social value.