At his pre-Halloween press conference, President George W. Bush told reporters, “I don't think the culture has changed to the extent that the American people or the Congress would totally ban abortions.”

He's probably right — most polls have the majority of Americans preferring restrictive abortion to a total ban. But that doesn't mean the culture isn't gradually becoming increasingly ill at ease with legal abortion.

It's gotten to the point where the most dyed-in-the-wool abortion advocates are having trouble ignoring — or covering up — the ugly realities of abortion. Some certainly try — a new Media Research Center study finds that of the Big Three news networks, two of them have not actually described a partial-birth abortion since 1998. (They know they couldn't possibly win if they did. So they try to keep people in the dark.)

But even the women's glossies are having their issues — it's just not possible in a culture of easily accessible information to hide the truth. So you find stories like one that appeared in Glamour's September issue, “Are You Ready to Really Understand Abortion?” The article is about a group of abortion clinics where “clients grapple openly with their feelings about having an abortion.” A subhead reads, “To fully understand this politically embattled procedure, every woman should spend a day inside these walls.”

Indeed. It would be hard to walk away from the exhibit and write a check to Planned Parenthood.

On the walls of the waiting room of Pittsburgh's Allegheny Reproductive Health Center are pink construction-paper hearts. “To my little angel,” one begins. “You will always be my baby. I will see you in heaven, sweetheart. I love you.” Another says: “I have a lot of goals to fulfill ... and with a child right now, those goals would be impossible. We all have freedom of choice, and my choice is to wait until I want a child and am married — not now.”

They're heartbreaking and maddening — especially when you see them; a few are reproduced in the magazine. Juvenile handwriting from mere girls who suffered through — and probably are still suffering — their exercise in “choice"; they are the pro-choice feminists’ trophies. “The mom you'll never meet” is how one mother signs her heart, to her fetus, her blob of tissue — spilling out her heart — “Each tear I cry will help me erase the memory of this day but not of you. You will always be a part of me even though you are not here with me.”

Glamour also reports that at these particular clinics, women ("girls” is probably more accurate in many cases) “pray over their fetuses, even to sprinkle them with holy water in impromptu baptismal rites.”

A culture exposed a little more to pain like this is bound to start to wonder — if it hasn't already.

Not even the abortionists themselves can finesse what they do, it seems. Walter Hern, director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic in Boulder, Colo., wrote the following in Slate, an online magazine, after the passage of a federal partial-birth-abortion ban in October (this one, this time, to be signed by the president): “Earlier this year, I began an abortion on a young woman who was 17 weeks pregnant. ... I inserted my forceps into the uterus and applied them to the head of the fetus, which was still alive, since fetal injection is not done at that stage of pregnancy. I closed the forceps, crushing the skull of the fetus, and withdrew the forceps. The fetus, now dead, slid out more or less intact.”

That was a physician writing, with no sense of irony or shame. I suspect relief and gratitude would not be the mother's reactions if she actually got the full rundown Slate readers got from Hern.

And ask the women whose writing is on the wall of the Allegheny abortion clinic if they didn't feel their abortions — and don't still feel them.

Of course, the battle is far from over. There are still the activists for one reason or another who will keep trying (covering up their own pain, in some cases) to avoid getting into the specifics of life with abortions. Kate Michelman, outgoing head of NARAL Pro-Choice America, told Glamour that “the pro-choice movement's job is not to wear every woman's feelings publicly.” (Don't ask her to take responsibility for what she's helped wrought.)

What we may be witnessing — despite Michelman's disregard or protest — is the beginning of a backlash. We've accepted, as a culture, some terrible evils — crimes against life — and allowed them to become mainstream. But, before we dig ourselves even deeper into the culture of death (cloning), now is the time for the culture to stop, lift the fog of doublespeak and reconsider its commitment to life. We all have a huge stake in it, as it so happens.

Toward that goal — of an embrace of a culture of life over death — Step One might be encouraging Hern to keep writing. The gospel of life clearly works through what's available.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.