I’ve always been mildly opposed to abortion as birth control mostly because it is barbaric. It strikes me as something people will look back on in the same way we look back on bleeding or the use of incantations. Reaching up inside a woman and ripping out her baby is a nasty business, even under the most extreme threat to the life of the mother. Doing it for the heck of it is barbarism.

Every society tolerates a certain amount of barbarism, but it’s never something to be encouraged. In another age, torturing animals was a form of public entertainment. Steve Pinker describes 19th century cat burning in one his books. Recruiting the slow-witted to bash one another to bloody pulp is a form of entertainment we call “boxing.” The point is barbarism is always a part of human society.

Just because we tolerate something does not mean we endorse it. Boxing is tolerated, but we don’t see it on free TV much as it is not something we want our kids to do so we subtly discourage it. Animal cruelty is banned because we don’t have to tolerate it. The difference here being that men fight by nature, while torturing animals is not part of our nature. Abortion is somewhere on the barbarism scale between tolerable and intolerable.

There’s also a matter of logic. Go into any pharmacy or grocery store and you will find racks of contraceptives. The cost of the most effective options is trivial. Even the poorest person can afford a box of rubbers. Therefore, demanding abortion as a form of contraceptive simply fails the logic test. It is, outside of rare cases, entirely unnecessary. Closing that door would make men and women more prudent about the legion of other choices on the shelf.

That said, I’ve also thought it best worked out locally. Abortion mills are businesses and subject to local laws. If towns in Mississippi don’t want them, then they can ban them. If Massachusetts wants to put them in grammar schools, that’s their business. Fundamentally, the thing that has always turned me off about abortion is that proponents are just using it to meddle in the lives of others. That and the creepy lying.

While nearly 100 percent of the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood involves its abortion practices, the group says that abortions account for only 3 percent of the services it provides. What do abortion treatment and recovery rooms look like? And what other services does Planned Parenthood provide? On a day when a new Planned Parenthood facility in Queens, N.Y., was closed to the public, Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric went behind the scenes to learn more.

The building is complete with a metal detector, bulletproof windows and round-the-clock security. In addition to medical consultants and clinicians, the facility offers social services and has a financial planner on site. Clinic director Latasha McGriff told Couric that since the facility opened on Sept. 1, clinic staffers have seen more than 1,200 men and women, representing 63 countries.

Abortion treatment? I guess we are supposed to think of it as just having some ointment rubbed on your arm to cure a disease. After all, who can really tell the difference between athletes foot and a child?

But that’s what you get from people who think more of plants and animals than human beings. Instead of being honest about the practice, they lie, which is not surprising. It’s how they lie that is creepy and demented. They think an abortion is no different than having a mole removed.

That’s where I always come back to on the abortion issue. The women holding up a picture of a fetus outside a clinic is motivated by a respect for human life. It may be over the top or even unhinged, but at least they have the moral clarity to understand the difference between an abortion and a manicure. Only a sociopath sees abortion amorally.

It’s not just the lack of morality. There’s a very weird celebration of abortion on display here. These people are proud of what they do and go out of their way to portray it as the truest form of feminism a woman can achieve. I’ve heard feminist say that you can’t be a woman without ever having had an abortion. It’s become a death cult for these people.

I guess that’s why I count myself as mildly opposed to abortion. I respect the religious arguments against it. I respect the moral and logical arguments against it. Those are to be hashed out locally where these issues are best handled. But what I can never get past is the unhinged enthusiasm of abortion fanatics. No matter where you come down on the morality of it, enthusiasm is simply beyond the pale.

It’s that enthusiasm that prevents me from being indifferent to the issue. People who think abortion is a rite of passage for women are one small step from celebrating infanticide and euthanasia. As soon as the line is crossed, where’s the next line and why would these people respect it? If snuffing out life in the womb as a matter of convenience is OK, then why not infanticide?

I know that’s the slippery slope argument, but some slopes are slippery. A core question any man of the Right must ask, with regards to public policy, is what are the consequences of being wrong? Banning abortion leaves open room for exceptions. Sanctifying abortion leaves open room for grizzly things like eugenics and infanticide. If you’re going to err, err on the side that does the least harm.