What Do You Call It?

Let me be right up front about two things here.
First, I do think there is a place for abortion. It must be medically determined and properly carried out, if it will spare the health or sanity of the mother. For instance, I can not imagine carrying to full term and giving birth to a baby created during a vicious rape. And don't give me that bullshit about rapes not resulting in pregnancies. I have actually heard that nonsense forwarded by people who damn well should know better. They can, and do, result from rape, and I think that is one of times when the option should be available. They should not, however, be available simply as a form of birth control. There are more than enough products out there to forestall the creation of a human life.
An abortion should be done only if the mother agrees to it. For myself, I carried my first pregnancy when I was 32. Doctors advised me to have amniocentesis done, so that I could "best determine a course of action" if there was found to be a problem. Checking with them for clarification on that euphemistic mumbo-jumbo brought out the truth that the advised "best" course would be to have an abortion, if the test revealed the presence of Down Syndrome. I refused the test and let all and sundry know that I was having that baby, come hell or high water. That said, however, I think a woman whose health is threatened by the pregnancy should have the chance to make a different decision than I did.
The second point I would make in any discussion about abortion is that it should be done at an early stage, or not at all. I think the murder of Wichita's Dr. George Tiller is anything but pro-life and any pro-lifer who denounced the accused Scott Roeder is smart to do so, but I also think it was just plain morally reprehensible for Tiller's clinic to be offering the late-term abortions that it did. It should have been shut down on the very same day that it tried to open.
It is almost impossible to view late-term abortions as anything other than murder, especially when everyone knows that if circumstances were different, if the baby arrived prematurely in a maternity ward, it would be given every medical opportunity and assistance to survive that our society has to offer. Part of the reason why it is possible for some to view such termination of a life as other than murder is the word games used to skirt the whole issue. Using the words "mass of foetal tissue" to refer to the life being ended helps to blur the reality of what is taking place in a clinic such as that run by the late Tiller. Move all the people involved in a scene at Tiller's clinic to the nearest maternity ward, and the "mass of tissue" would become a "preemie", a baby.
Human life is created at the moment of conception. It does not somehow wait until the foetus can draw independent breath outside the mother's body. That's playing with words. That's indulging in euphemistic wordplay in order to avoid the truth. No-one bothers debating over whether or not two zebras, for instance, create a zebra when they mate. Neither do they bother with such nonsense when the animals in question are any other of the species with which we share this earth. They only cavil over the first moment of human life and the terms to be used in reference to it in order to facilitate making the termination of that life less open to the question of legality.
If Tiller and his ilk perform abortions of babies that could and would be saved were the circumstance of their arrival different, then surely they are indulging in what should be an illegal activity.