Imagine a woman you know: your wife or mother. Your next-door neighbor. A teacher. A doctor. The bus driver who gets your kids to school each day. Imagine her sitting in front of a video screen at an abortion clinic “teleconferencing” with a doctor. A few minutes later, a drawer opens in front of her, and she removes a cocktail of drugs — not medicines to treat an illness, but lethal substances that will allow her to go home and kill her baby in the comfort of her own home.

If that isn’t Orwellian and terrifying enough for you, imagine it’s your daughter in front of that video screen. Your daughter who is now upstairs in her room, bleeding and scared and in pain, wondering if the abortion is over and her baby is dead.

This is neither science fiction nor a prediction of dark days to come. This is happening now. It started nearly two years ago, the brainchild of those business-savvy folks at Planned Parenthood of Iowa. In an effort to make sure that women all over the mostly rural state can find ways to abort their children, Planned Parenthood offers the “telemed abortion.” Women can go to most Planned Parenthood facilities in Iowa to be connected with a doctor, via video, in Des Moines.

This is how far we have fallen. Drugs strong enough to kill and expel a baby are dispensed like aspirin. Taking their cue from a state law that says only physicians may perform abortions, Operation Rescue has filed a complaint with the Iowa Board of Medicine. An inquiry is promised, according to The Des Moines Register. Yet the paper also notes that “the system is drawing interest from other abortion providers around the country.”

And why wouldn’t it? Think of the profit Planned Parenthood would reap if it could reach all the women who now have to carry to term simply because they live too far from an abortion mill. Chemical abortions are cheaper than surgical procedures, but think of the repeat traffic. These are abortions you can have while doing your homework. You can even tweet about it, or make a YouTube video as it’s happening, as a young woman named Angie Jackson did with horrifying detachment just a few months ago. “It’s not that bad,” she assured those following her on Twitter and YouTube.

“It’s all about access, and the reality is that for many of our patients, they’d have to travel for hours to Des Moines” if the system wasn’t available, Dr. Tom Ross, one of the Planned Parenthood talking heads who dispenses the lethal drugs via remote control, told the Des Moines newspaper.

Do you see what’s happening here? The pro-abortionists’ false mantra of making abortion “safe, legal and rare” has been replaced with “get ’em while they’re young.” And please, make it convenient.

This whole teleconferencing method is just another piece of evidence that the abortion industry is frantically trying to make up for the lack of staff willing to perform abortions.

Fortunately, their efforts aren’t working very well. The very existence of chemical abortions was, they had hoped, going to be the solution to dwindling ranks of abortionists. But doctors who have too much of a conscience to kill children with forceps are proving to have too much of a conscience to kill them with pills.

We just have to keep sounding the alarm.

Father Pavone is national director of Priests for Life.