Austin, Texas, city officials are pushing for federal legislation that would overturn state laws restricting abortion. That of itself is obviously worrisome for those who would like to see less federal involvement in matters where the states should be able to govern for themselves. Are laws and regulations concerning women’s healthcare one of those areas where the state should have the right to legislate, without federal government having to get involved?

If you are thinking that the topic under discussion, namely, regulations on aborting live human beings — i.e., killing them — isn’t about women’s health care, you need to think again. Both sides of the aisle in this case are arguing that it is.

Opponents of Texas House Bill 2, passed in October of 2012, claim that it restricts a woman’s access to “safe reproductive health care” or “safe reproductive services.” That I find odd, since what abortion actually does, by definition, is terminate a pregnancy — by killing a live human being — only after the reproductive process has already reached its determinate end, namely, to produce another person.

After all, what else is the natural end of reproduction and by what other process does a human come into the world — natural or other wise, that would have to be through the process of reproduction. But the conception of a new life only occurs when the reproductive process has been completed. From that point on, the biological process is the new individual’s development, no longer the process of reproduction.

Certainly, the H2 Bill aims to restrict abortion, and it would be deceptive to claim that that is not the case. However, what the law does not do is restrict all abortion, nor does it limit women’s access to reproductive or any other sort of health care. As proponents of the law suggest, the H2 Bill relates to “the regulation of abortion procedures, providers, and facilities; providing penalties.” Here is a link to the bill so you can read it for yourself.

In summary, the bill in its entirety relates to safety measures and concerns — Yes, this is hard to fathom when it also necessarily concerns the death of a living individual. What else is the point of an abortion?

But of course safety and sanitation ought to be considered, right? It is, after all, the abortion activist lobby saying that’s what this is all about. And maybe they should be mindful of that. Does the name Kermit Gosnell ring a bell? How many women were killed by botched abortion procedures last year? You won’t hear them giving the answer. So how concerned are they for women’s health issues, really?

Yet they insist that their concerns in this case are over safe care for women — both sides are saying that, both sides are pointing the finger at the other for disregarding that concern. This isn’t ironic. This is a blatant manipulation of terms. It’s all a language game. It’s a game of deception.

Meanwhile, human lives are at stake. Certainly, the life of the mother is at risk and that is a very important concern, but somehow in this debate over abortion, which has now boiled down to a language war, they are causing people to forget about the most essential thing here. It is the one thing without which we would not even be considering abortion in the first place — the life of a defenseless child.