Bloody Pensacola.

There can be no way to justify, defend, mitigate, or excuse the shooting of Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida. Killing to save the lives of the unborn is still murder. As Helen Alvare, director of the NCCB's prolife office, put it, "killing in the name of prolife makes a mockery of the prolife cause."

Unfortunately, the murder of Dr. Gunn was an act of violence waiting to happen, and neither the church nor the mainstream prolife movement has fully come to grips with that fact. They have tolerated, and in some cases fostered, a rhetoric and imagery about killing babies that achieve stark simplicity at the cost of overlooking much of what makes abortion the morally embattled issue that it is. First, the moral status of the unborn, and the right of the fetus to equal protection under the law, are simply not self-evident to everyone in the same way as are the rights of Dr. Gunn, or of any woman. Second, on the basis of this ambiguity, abortion has been rendered legal and protected by the same constitutional system that, for all its imperfections, is the safeguard for all our rights and the only likely means for ever reversing the abortion status quo.

By ignoring these complexities in its workaday vocabulary, the prolife movement disarms itself before groups such as Operation Rescue and Rescue America that drive a simplified argument about "killing babies" to its logical extremes. "Rescue" groups disrupt and destroy clinics, intimidate clinic personnel, and harass women arriving at clinics. This is nothing but vigilantism. The defense of such actions--that they stop baby killing and stop the work of "baby killers"--slides naturally into the kind of justification for even further violence that a few of their spokesmen toyed with in the case of Dr. Gunn.

Out of a misplaced sense of solidarity, the mainstream prolife movement has refused to take a clear distance from such groups, who also often undermine their concern for the unborn by expressing a virulent animosity toward all but the most traditional of women. It was a pity, for example, that nowhere did this topic emerge on the agenda of a recent conference of Catholic intellectuals at Saint Louis University on abortion and public policy. Instead, in mounting logically impressive arguments against the Supreme Court's abortion rulings, some of the participants came perilously close to saying that Dr. Gunn's killer had a good case.

The logic and policy agenda of the consistent ethic of life offers the most serious and solid ground on which to defend the life of the unborn. Its capacious definition of whom to include among the living (everyone) and its generous reading of what it means to favor the lives of the unborn and the condemned, the dying, the poor, the vulnerable, along with the lives of the whole and the hearty, implicitly recognizes the social nature of the human person and the social solidarity that sustains its maintenance.

Preserving this web of responsibility, we believe, is what will finally reduce the numbers of abortions along with the violence done to children, women, and men by poverty, drugs, and unemployment. Unfortunately, not all prolife advocates have embraced the consistent ethic. The time is overdue for drawing some clear lines.