From a purely scientific, secular perspective, abortion is the killing of a human being.

Anyone who has taken high school biology, or sex ed, knows that at the moment of conception, a new human organism is formed with a unique set of DNA that will never change.

This is confirmed by a wide range of scientific sources, one of which says:

"To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion... it is plain experimental evidence."  (Dr. Jérôme Lejeune, the "Father of Modern Genetics," University of Descartes, Paris.)

Hence, when you hear all the rejoicing on the left that Ireland has decided to legalize abortion, you need to understand that leftists are cheering for the legalized killing of the most defenseless human beings in the world.

That in turn shows that the left's claim to be caring and compassionate is a lie.  Rather, leftists believe that if it takes the killing of the innocent unborn human being to enable their sexually hedonistic lifestyles, then so be it.

This is not surprising, since everything pro-abortionists say is either a lie or a distortion, starting with the term "pro-choice."

People who advocate for legalized abortion aren't advocating for choice; they're advocating for abortion.  If you doubt that, ask yourself this: if someone said he is pro-choice on slavery – that is, he wouldn't own slaves himself, but he feels that others have the right to own slaves, would you say that he isn't pro-slavery?

But since it's hard to convince decent people that murdering defenseless unborn children is a good thing, the pro-abortion elite in America have to lie unceasingly in order to confuse the public.

The core lie is that the logic behind legalized abortion is at all different from that behind the Holocaust or slavery.  In all three cases, organisms that science tells us are fully human – the unborn, Jews, and blacks – were declared to not be "persons" and hence not entitled to human rights.

For any of these evils to be legal, it must be assumed that the government has the power to define which biological human beings are persons worthy of human rights.  But that goes directly against the founding beliefs of America – namely, that we are all endowed with certain rights irrespective of our power, wealth, or abilities, and that government can't take those rights away.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Clearly, to legalize the killing of the unborn, pro-abortion fanatics must either believe that the unborn aren't human – and hence reject science – or believe that it's okay for the government to declare that some human beings don't have human rights.

The left wasn't able to convince many Americans to believe in its lies about abortion, which is why it had to be legalized by judicial fiat and propped up by a massive propaganda effort that ignores science and depends on lies and distortions.

How many times have you heard someone say abortion has to be legal because of some young girl who was raped?  Yet according to the Guttmacher institute, a Planned Parenthood-affiliated think-tank, only 1% of abortions are due to rape.  Only 12% of women said they had an abortion for health reasons – given that health reasons include being depressed, it's safe to say that this 12% number is far larger than the number of women who needed an abortion to save their lives.

Even if we use the 12% number, the reality is that 87-plus percent of abortions are due to convenience – less than 0.5% are due to incest.

Yet you will never hear a pro-abortion advocate give you an example of why a healthy mother who just doesn't want a child, or whose significant other doesn't want one, should be able to kill her unborn daughter.

In America today, it is legal to kill an unborn child for any reason at any time up to birth.  While some states have put maximum ages on when abortion can occur, the Supreme Court ruling itself puts no definitive limits.  The pro-abortion crowd fights tooth and nail to keep abortion legal beyond 20 weeks, when the unborn child looks like this:

While abortion fanatics call those who value human life extremists, the real extremists are the abortion-lovers who support sex-selection abortion and urge women whose babies might be less than "perfect" to kill their children.  Only in the modern left could women be called "feminists" who say it should be legal to murder your unborn daughter if you want a boy.

The reality is that supporting abortion inevitably requires the rejection of either science or the core belief of Western civilization that each human life has value.  As such, it's not surprising that leftists who reject the idea of human equality and firmly believe they are better than the rest of us support the right of the powerful to kill the defenseless.

Lincoln pointed out that you can't fool all the people all the time, which is why America is getting more and more pro-life.  In the end, the truth shines through the leftists' propaganda.  Today, nearly three quarters of Americans would limit abortion to the first trimester or more stringent restrictions.

Most Americans who say they are "pro-choice" support only the "hard" cases such as rape, incest, and threat to the life of the mother or abortions that occur in the first trimester.  That's because they believe that killing the child is more compassionate than forcing the mother to go through pregnancy.  In fairness to them, they rarely actually think about the fact that abortion is murder.  That's because the media and the culture lie constantly and universally about what an abortion really is.

It's a leftist trope to always talk about the perpetrator in sympathetic terms and ignore the victim when trying to get society to go easy on murderers, rapists, and drug-dealers.  Leftists use the same tactic when it comes to abortion.  We hear about how an "unplanned" pregnancy could adversely impact a woman's career, but we never hear about how being killed in the womb will impact her daughter's life.

As a result, while the hardcore abortion-supporters, the ones who say abortion is good and not a necessary evil, are monsters, the average person who doesn't take a stand against abortion is driven by the fake news he's heard about abortion all his life and a misplaced compassion that depends on having been taught over and over that the unborn are somehow magically not human.

That's why leftists react so strongly to any attempt to discuss the truth about abortion: once people see that two human beings keep an abortion appointment, but only one leaves alive, their support for abortion for any reason at any time will decrease.

That's why leftists were so desperate to hide the fact that Planned Parenthood sold baby parts for cash and that famed abortionist Kermit Gosnell treated women horribly.  If people saw through the lie that abortionists are altruists who are just in it to help women and saw abortionists for the incompetent doctors they are, who are in it only for the money, support for abortion, and funding for Planned Parenthood, would dwindle.

America fought a war to establish that all blacks are persons.  It's time to fight a political war to end the execution of the defenseless unborn.  If we don't, it won't be long before the all-powerful government decides that you and I aren't persons, either.

You can read more of Tom's rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious, and feel free to follow him on Twitter.