Recording our podcast last week, Mona Charen and I talked to George Will. One of the things I mentioned is that Will had an influence on me where the issue of abortion was concerned. When I was in college, kind of figuring things out, I read a column or two by him about abortion, at least one of them discussing his son Jonathan, who was born with Down syndrome.

This must be a time for memory and abortion. In my column today, I touch on a recent crime in Colorado, wherein a woman cut the child from another woman’s womb and killed that child. The killer will not be charged with murder: because the baby is not considered to have been a person.

I thought of a case that occurred when I was in college. This, like those Will columns and many other things, had an influence on me. To read about the case, go here. In 1984, a drunk driver in St. Paul, Minn., ran into a pregnant woman, causing the death of the baby — a boy who had been eight and a half months along. The driver could not be held responsible for vehicular manslaughter: because the baby was not, you know, a person.

That didn’t seem right to me. It still doesn’t. How could you tell a mother who has lost her child, her fetus, “Don’t worry, it wasn’t a human being anyway”? If the unborn child is not a child: Who/what is it?

Such questions should haunt the conscience.