In his Feb. 4 column, Darrell Berkheimer used an interesting argument to support the need for abortion namely that making abortions an exception rather than a rule would lead to increase costs to care for the mothers and the children who resulted from the births. He suggested that the public was not ready to pay the extra costs that would result.

I wonder if Mr. Berkheimer, had he lived in the early 1800s, would have justified slavery on the basis that it would cost the slave masters too much to give up slaves, the public would be forced to support the now-freed slaves, and the cost of paying decent wages to the laborers would increase the cost of clothing to the consumers. Those arguments were no doubt made at that time, and those reasons are as false in supporting slavery as the reasons Mr. Berkheimer used to support the abortion mind-set that has pervaded our culture since Roe v. Wade?

Now in the early 21st century, most of us in the United States consider that slavery was, and still is, an evil. Many of us believe that the killing of live fetuses for convenience is just as much an evil as slavery. Women, who have been nurturing life for thousands of years, have justified this evil by calling it "a woman's right to choose." A woman certainly has a right to choose, but shouldn't that be done prior to engaging in sexual intercourse? And what about the female fetus, is she granted the same right to choose? I will admit that there are exceptional circumstances where abortion might be considered, but I believe we need to change the mind-set that abortions should be the rule, not the exception.

Along with most Christians, I believe that life begins at conception. I hear explanations by abortion supporters that life only starts when the fetus is viable. Is the fetus viable (able to live without its mother) within the first two years? I don't think so. Should we then be able to kill babies as well? Didn't we just put Dr. Kermit Gosnell in prison in 2013 as a serial baby killer for executing babies immediately after birth? Why is that wrong if we allow fetuses to be killed just a few months earlier?

A second step is to change the publics mind-set to recognize that abortion is actually murder, and is unacceptable to educated, reasonable people.

What is the solution? Just as the abolition of slavery required a major change to our thought processes and our economic structures, the abolition of abortions as generally accepted procedures requires the same changes. We need to continue to educate boys and girls concerning the dangers of unprotected sex, one of which is an unwanted baby.

A second step is to change the public's mind-set to recognize that "abortion" is actually "murder," and is unacceptable to educated, reasonable people. As long as we split hairs about when a fetus is viable in order to condone the killing of living human beings, aren't we acting in the same way that slave owners did when they claimed that slaves were not really human beings?

A third step is to make adoptions more accessible to more people who actually want to have children. We place high costs and a lot of hoops to jump through as part of our adoption process. We certainly need to screen parents before putting other's unwanted babies in their hands, but we have made it exceedingly difficult in the U.S. for would-be parents to become real parents.

A fourth step is to shift the funding of abortions to the funding of adoptions and to the care of unwanted children who may not be adopted. I don't want my taxes to fund abortions, but I am willing that those taxes be used to facilitate the care of unwanted children and mothers who need a helping hand.

As an aside: why am I against the support of Planned Parenthood? While it claims that only 3 percent of its "procedures" include abortions, that amounts to one-third to one-half of all the abortions performed in the United States. Planned Parenthood counts "services," not the time spent in providing those services. Since many of their "services" involve handing out condoms and referring women for mammograms, I believe the manpower spent handling abortions is far higher than 3 percent of the total work effort.

It's time for all of us to recognize an evil in our world and eliminate it in the 21st century, as the abolitionists did for slavery in the 19th century!

Jim Goetsch lives in Lake of the Pines.

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Jim Goetsch: Abolition of abortions means changing the way we think - The Union of Grass Valley