New children's book asks: what is an abortion?

Big League Politics posted a story yesterday about a children's book titled - and I am not making this up - What's An Abortion, Anyway?

Does anyone else catch the irony about this?

A book for children.

About abortion.

As if our kids aren't having enough of their childhood taken away from them already.  Now comes this.

(And I can't even find a literary agent for the book I wrote about a little girl and her doggie...)

I remember the first time I learned what an abortion is.  I was nine years old.  I asked one of my parents "what's an abortion?" after seeing it mentioned on the six o'clock news.  I will never forget the answer, it chilled me to the bone so coldly: "It's when a mother kills her child before it's born."

Why?  Why would a mother do that?

Almost forty years later, I still can't understand.  Oh, I know the rationale about it even if it goes unsaid: that some human life is "inconvenient" enough to be deemed disposable.  But I just can't wrap my brain about how someone can carry an unborn child within her, to feel that kind of LIFE growing and being nurtured, only to have it vacuum aspirated out of existence.

If a book really wants to inform small children about what an abortion is, it should show them the photos I have seen of actual aborted fetuses.  They should see the tiny lifeless bodies with faces and fingerprints of their own, chopped up into pieces on cold metal dishes.  They should be told the real cost of an abortion: the regret that many women come to feel after having their babies butchered within their womb.

Books such as this, and too many materials in our (almost always public) schools, are placing an enormous and inappropriate burden on our children.  They are expecting children to have a grasp of adult concepts, at an age when they should be enjoying being innocent of such things.  I asked about what is an abortion because I sincerely wanted to know.  If I was too young at the time, I trust my parents would not have told me.  They would have said "you'll understand someday" if they thought I couldn't handle it.  As it was, I had already learned about human reproduction at age seven.  I was curious so I read about it in the World Book Encyclopedia.  Interestingly, that article never mentioned abortion.

If we are going to teach children about abortion and make it sound safe and sanitary and routine, then we had also better be prepared to teach them about other "adult concepts", like God and theology and the notion that there is absolute good and evil in this world.  Let's do that and let the children decide for themselves about the "sanctity" of abortion, if it's so unassailable an idea.

Would "progressives" be that accommodating?  Somehow, I doubt it.