Are the Unborn Protected or Not? I'm Confused

"Authorities Want to Arrest Pregnant Woman to Protect Unborn Child." So the headline read this past Wednesday over at MSNBC. The woman in question is an habitual drug user who has repeatedly refused treatment. The district attorney wants to arrest the woman to protect the unborn child from her uncontrolled drug abuse. The author of the article called the action "controversial," yet only a couple of sentences later reported that "Parents can't understand why a woman would use drugs with a baby due in just a few months. 'I’ve been a dad and a grandfather for over a year, and it's hard for me to imagine why someone would ever do that to a child. Why they wouldn't take care of them?' Frank Schinko said."

Interesting how common sense can understand the need to protect life even when it is pre-born, yet the so-called right to terminate a pregnancy is considered one of the most sacred of choices. It is also interesting how many states protect the life of an unborn child when the mother is injured or attacked. The following link is dated to 1999, but I wonder if many of these laws have been since changed. I suspect very few. The law easily recognizes what the law easily dismisses. How ironic.

If there is any doubt on the above link, check out the Wikipedia article "Unborn Victims of Violence Act" from 2004. Yet the irony rises here again. In the first paragraph we read the following:
"The Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 (Public Law 108-212) is a United States law which recognizes a "child in utero" as a legal victim, if he or she is injured or killed during the commission of any of over 60 listed federal crimes of violence. The law defines "child in utero" as "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb."

Then a little later we read this:
"The legislation was both hailed and vilified by various legal observers who interpreted the measure as a step toward granting legal personhood to human fetuses, even though the bill explicitly contained a provision excepting abortion, stating that the bill would not 'be construed to permit the prosecution' 'of any person for conduct relating to an abortion for which the consent of the pregnant woman, or a person authorized by law to act on her behalf', 'of any person for any medical treatment of the pregnant woman or her unborn child' or 'of any woman with respect to her unborn child.'"

So let me see if I get this right. If I deliberately injure a woman and cause the death of her unborn child, I can be prosecuted. But if that woman decides to bring about the death of that unborn child herself through abortion, she is legally protected. I'd say we are confused here on the nature of unborn life, but that's probably not the real point. The point is that we know killing is wrong, in any form. On the other hand, we also are a society of situational ethics, where we change the definition of right and wrong depending on how ii impacts our personal preferences. And within that is the sin that continues to bring about one of the greatest holocausts mankind has ever known.