By KURT BEYERS

"Pro-life" has been much in the news since John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Every news anchor and commentator who talks about her includes the information that she is staunchly "pro-life," which means only one thing: She is for making abortion, both in the getting and the performing, a criminal offense.

What has finally stuck deeply enough into my craw that I have to hack it out onto a keyboard is the casual use of the term "pro-life" to describe this political position. It's as if anyone who disagrees in any way at all is anti-life or pro-death or something. This implication is intentional on the part of those people who came up with the "pro-life" label for themselves.

For the record, I personally think that abortion is always a tragedy of either circumstance or conscience, but simply declaring it illegal is not a good way to stop it. Believing this does not make me pro-abortion.

When you get right down to it, "pro-life," as an adjective to describe one of the main political positions for social conservatives, has no meaning at all beyond the nine-month human gestation period. In fact, there are a whole lot of people up and walking around outside the womb who social conservatives say they wouldn't mind killing. Many of their favorite pundits even like to make jokes -- or half-jokes, who knows -- about how satisfactory it would be to knock off a few liberals here and there, the liberal point of view being so ignorant and dangerous.

And how about this. Anti-abortion campaigners like to call abortion murder, so you have to wonder: Do they favor the death penalty for this class of murderers? If not, what penalties do apply? Life -- to expand the definition into the legal realm -- in prison? They don't volunteer much information on the criminal penalties they want for the crime of abortion.

There's another consideration that the pro-life political campaign doesn't much address. The staunchest advocates want abortion outlawed even in the case of rape and incest. What about women and young girls who are victims of these crimes? What kind of help, if any, will be provided once the law forces them to carry to term the children they were forced to conceive? Do we then force them to raise these children, or do the infants go straight into the adoption-foster care system? And for those who simply cannot bear to give birth under these circumstances, and who do not have the money to escape detection, do they get any consideration in sentencing?

Well, there are a lot of other questions that aren't much asked, that get tossed into a file drawer labeled "pro-life" and then forgotten.

But it's galling. You would think that people who claim to be "pro-life," even in the limited sense of not killing somebody, would be broadly anti-killing, or at least more judicious in the things they support that necessarily involve killing. War comes to mind. Yet it is liberals, by and large, who think that more than 4,100 dead American troops and thousands of dead Iraqi children since March 2003, and thousands more mangled for life (there's that word again) constitute a tragedy that should not be casually dismissed as nothing more than an unfortunate cost of war. It is also mainly liberals who complain that in the name of the United States of America innocents have been tortured and killed while in our custody.

But to be concerned about this takes a somewhat broader definition of "life" than that covered by the pro-life label.

You could maybe even expect that jokes about killing people of a liberal persuasion wouldn't be popular among people who so proudly call themselves "pro-life," but maybe that's just me being a liberal.

Liberals, I hear, are famous for lacking a sense of humor.

Kurt Beyers, who was news editor of The Hays Daily News from 1984 to 1994, is assistant director of University Relations at Fort Hays State University.