The reason people are okay with abortion is because they can't see it. That's the only real reason. Just as we don't care about what's going on in Darfur or North Korea, just as we're not up in arms about the inhumane conditions in slaughterhouses, even though we would be shocked if we saw genocide in our home towns or saw a guy attacking a sick dying cow with an electric cattle prod, we're okay with killing babies that we can't see, but not okay with killing ones that we can. There's no coherent explanation for why killing a newborn baby is murder but killing a fetus isn't. It's just that one's visible and the other's not. Now maybe that's somehow okay. I mean, if I spent x dollars on certain charities instead of shoes, I could save lives; my choice of shoes over charity is in effect killing kids in Africa. We don't think that's necessarily wrong, while we do think that if there's a starving child on your doorstep, you have to somehow save them. Is there some rational reason to treat the two situations differently, perhaps not; maybe what it proves is that ethics are a myth in general, because any one ethical obligation quickly becomes an infinite and impossible obligation to act on if you really carry it to its logical conclusion. Perhaps, as the original poster says, human life isn't precious after all. That isn't my opinion, but it isn't a totally unreasonable one, given how callously we treat human lives as long as they're distant and remote.