All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the infamous Roe v. Wade decision—a monstrosity that has presided over the legal killing of over 55 million human beings since 1973. And yet in the wake of this horror, the pro-abortionists are feeling the wind at their backs.

They’ve just reelected the most pro-abortion president in U. S. history. They received news this week that Roe v. Wade is more popular than ever with the American people. They’re doing touchdown dances in the endzone with creepy video tributes to abortion rights. And they’re convincing their political opposition to stand down.

They are also becoming more brazen in stating what they really believe about abortion. But I question whether Americans are ready to buy into what you are about to read.

In an article for Salon.com, Mary Elizabeth Williams writes an essay that is sure to send a chill up the spine of anyone who reads it. In short, she argues that human life begins at conception and that women should nevertheless have the right to kill their unborn babies. The humanity of the unborn should not be in question. Her argument is simply that some people’s lives are more important than other people’s lives. You’re going to have to read this to believe it. In her own words:

All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.

When we on the pro-choice side get cagey around the life question, it makes us illogically contradictory. I have friends who have referred to their abortions in terms of “scraping out a bunch of cells” and then a few years later were exultant over the pregnancies that they unhesitatingly described in terms of “the baby” and “this kid.” I know women who have been relieved at their abortions and grieved over their miscarriages. Why can’t we agree that how they felt about their pregnancies was vastly different, but that it’s pretty silly to pretend that what was growing inside of them wasn’t the same? Fetuses aren’t selective like that. They don’t qualify as human life only if they’re intended to be born.

When we try to act like a pregnancy doesn’t involve human life, we wind up drawing stupid semantic lines in the sand: first trimester abortion vs. second trimester vs. late term, dancing around the issue trying to decide if there’s a single magic moment when a fetus becomes a person. Are you human only when you’re born? Only when you’re viable outside of the womb? Are you less of a human life when you look like a tadpole than when you can suck on your thumb?

Notice how radical this essay is. Ms. Williams agrees with pro-lifers that the unborn are fully human persons. The humanity of the unborn is not in dispute! What is in dispute is whether every person has an intrinsic right to life. According to Williams, some people do have that right and some people don’t. I wonder if she would allow that argument to be applied to other classes of persons as well.

Williams contends that a woman’s “life” always trumps the life of the unborn baby. At this point, the author equivocates on the meaning of the word “life.” For the baby, “life” refers to physical life. For the mother, “life” refers more generically to the “way of life” that a woman chooses for herself. In short, a woman’s chosen “way of life” is more important than protecting the physical life of her child. She concludes with these chilling lines:

I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.

Behold the pro-death regime at its most honest. The cause of feminist equality must be preserved at all costs, even if it means killing one’s own child to achieve it.

Denny Burk is Associate Professor of New Testament and Dean of Boyce College, the undergraduate arm of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminar. He blogs on matters concerning politics, theology and culture. This article is used with his permission.