Peggy Noonan is a very thoughtful columnist (one of my favs), and generally she builds up her arguments subtly. On the subject of abortion, however, you can read in her text the frustration she feels at having witnessed nearly four decades of furrowed-brow parsing of emanations and penumbras.

I remember a statement from her in her book What I Saw At The Revolution that went something like this: "If you saw a brown paper bag on the sidewalk, and you weren't sure if what was in it was alive, would you kick it?"

From her most recent column:

As I watched I thought: How about "Let the baby live"? Don't parse it. Just "Let the baby live."

. . .

You know why they call it birth control? Because it's meant to stop a birth from happening nine months later. We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins.

To put it another way, with conception something begins. What do you think it is? A car? A 1948 Buick?