If I weren’t afraid of stale metaphors, I’d say this is where the rubber meets the road.

Some MPs are rallying support for a proposed law that would make it a crime to kill or injure an unborn child after a Winnipeg woman, who was eight months pregnant, was shot to death.

Conservative MP Ken Epp, who recently tabled private member’s bill C-484 called the “Unborn Victims of Crime Act,” said the legislation would create a new offence in the Criminal Code. The bill addresses a “huge gap” in law when a violent act is perpetrated against a woman who has chosen to carry the fetus to term, he said.

“This is a case when the woman has decided to have that child, and that choice has to be protected in law,” Epp said. “I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m pro-life. But this bill goes very narrowly at one issue — where the woman has made the choice to have the child, and that choice is taken away unilaterally, without her consent and usually with violence.”

Seems like a no-brainer. Most people, I think, would agree attacking a pregnant woman is worse than attacking a man or a non-pregnant woman. It’s just one of these things everybody knows. Including, it would appear, the pro-abortion person the newspaper story had to quote.

Carolyn Egan, a spokeswoman for the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, said the usual things about slippery slopes and women’s rights (as if the rights of women who actually want to keep their babies didn’t count), but then, in the words of the newspaper story, she “suggested a more appropriate way of dealing with such a serious crime is for the courts to impose a stiffer sentence for the perpetrator when the victim is pregnant.”

And nobody thought to ask her why. Why impose a stiffer sentence for the perpetrator when the victim is pregnant? Why should the justice system care about a clump of cells that, we insist, is NOT a person?