Every day, innocent people who have wronged no one are killed. This occurs every day, in hospitals all across America.

And every day, women exercise their reproductive freedom and their right to privacy and terminate their pregnancies through abortion.

Same event, two descriptions. That's the problem with the abortion debate in America. Essentially, it boils down to a conflict of beliefs. Unlike other social issues that center around policy differences, abortion, at its heart, is an issue of faith.

When liberals and conservatives disagree over welfare, compromise is possible because no fundamental principle is at stake. Abortion is different. Is a fetus a human life? If you believe it isn't, a world of social policy possibilities opens up before you. If you believe it is and you don't scoff at the sanctity of human life, you are in a quandary.

Though decidedly pro-choice myself, I have always understood hard-core pro-lifers. My beliefs tell me that the fetus is more than a heap of placental tissue but by no means a full human life. Therefore, I have the luxury of supporting mothers' "reproductive freedom" and a woman's right to choose.

But anti-abortion activists believe that a fetus is as human as you and me. Abortion for them is murder, plain and simple. And Medicaid funding of abortion is nothing less than state-sponsored execution. If you believe that, how can you not picket abortion clinics and fight for a Constitutional amendment? If murder is happening in America's hospitals every day, how can you not fight to stop it?

Pat Buchanan actually talks some sense when he refuses to consider exceptions in the cases of rape or incest. If the fetus is a human life, then its survival trumps everything else, except the life of the mother. The circumstances under which it was conceived are irrelevant. As Buchanan's campaign manager was quoted a few days ago in The New York Times, "You wouldn't say that you could kill a 1-year-old child because it was conceived in a rape."

It is this crisis of faith that makes the recent debate within the Republican party so interesting. Pro-choice Republicans have been making noise lately, arguing that they should not be silenced. Currently the party platform is explicitly pro-life and leaves no room for dissent.

But Governors Weld, Whitman and Pataki, displaying either political principle or electoral pragmatism, have vowed to modify the platform to include pro-choice politicians like them. Weld is now pressuring the party to appoint new, pro-choice delegates to represent Massachusetts at the Republican convention this summer. He hopes to garner support for a more open, tolerant platform.

Will these dissenters succeed? It depends on what most Republicans believe about abortion. Do most really believe that abortion is fundamentally equivalent to murder and that compromise is ethical surrender? I doubt it. There are those that do, and those people are the ones who set up counseling services for pregnant teenagers and help parents of unwanted children find foster families. They see abortion as a moral dilemma, not as a chance to villify the poor.

But for many Republicans, abortion is merely one of a host of issues--the death penalty, school choice, flag-burning--that supposedly stand for a commitment to values in the face of moral decay in America. These people, Bob Dole among them, don't believe in the sanctity of the human fetus, and they compromise in the cases of rape and incest.

The moderate wing of the party finally has had the good sense to expose the hypocrisy of that position. Once the issue of life is gone, no one in good conscience can support antiabortion legislation that hurts the poor alone. Either you believe a fetus is human or you don't. If most Republicans have their doubts, they should have the freedom of choice--to take a more liberal stance on abortion.

This is Ethan M. Tucker's last column of the semester.