At the end of October, I got a call inviting me to watch history in action, up close and personal. “This is the White House,” said the young man on the telephone. “We’d like to invite you to witness the signing of the Partial Birth Abortion Act on November 5. We need your social security number and your date of birth.”

As White House events go, it was large. The place was the Ronald Reagan building, a few yards up Pennsylvania Avenue from # 1600. It struck me as rather appropriate, since it is named for the president who wrote a book against abortion - and whose wife has sadly become one of the strongest campaigners for experiments on embryos.

I entered to find a throng of people waiting. Someone says she had been here for two hours standing in line. It is curiously chaotic. I keep bumping into friends – Mariam Bell and Jim Tonkowich from Wilberforce Forum, Sandy Rios of Concerned Women for America, Irene Napier of Illinois Right to Life, Andrea Lafferty of Traditional Values Coalition - a roll-call of the groups and individuals who through years of toil and prayer have helped bring the nation to this point in history.

Then I see another friend, Bill Wichterman who works for Senator Frist. Pressing into the auditorium, more friends join us – Connie Mackey of Family Research Council, Lori Waters of Eagle Forum.

Suddenly we are quiet. A few feet away we see the Attorney General, John Ashcroft; Congressman Henry Hyde, long-time stalwart of the pro-life movement on Capitol Hill; and other key Senate and House supporters of the bill. Then in walks the President, stage left. He looks taller than people expect. He walks with energy and a strong sense of purpose. He takes command of the meeting, and begins to speak. He welcomes the many key leaders in the room, and then describes the awfulness of the partial-birth procedure, and our victory for children and their mothers.

Of course, the courts had been petitioned even before the bill was signed. Judges here and there have stayed its enforcement while they hear arguments. It will almost certainly end in the Supreme Court, where many things will be tested along with the law – whether Congress may limit even the worst excrescences of the abortion culture, and whether the highest court in the land will value the half-born child.

The Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act is the signal achievement of the pro-life movement because it puts the spotlight on a child already half-way to being received by the human community, only to be done to death in a manner that had it happened minutes later would command the universal outrage of our culture.

I think it was C. Everett Koop who once said how appalled he was to have the killing of a newborn described as “abortion ex utero” – outside the womb. Here, in partial-birth abortion, we have abortion and infanticide rolled into one.

The fundamental problem of pro-choice America lies in the utter failure of its imagination, the failure of generally well-meaning people who love their babies and fight for the welfare of children to see in the unborn equal candidates for that love and that loyalty. That does not mean they are unmoved by abortion. For many it is seen as tragedy, an entailment of difficult circumstances or simply a right – like free speech – to be defended even if the speech is offensive. There are pro-choicers who have told me that they could never have an abortion, whatever their circumstances.

These many people, women and men, our neighbors and family members and fellow-citizens, have little in common except this: they will not, at the end of the day, grant that little child the right to triumph over all other arguments and circumstances – a right they will grant without question to a child in a crib. They simply do not consider this fetal child to be “one of us,” a fellow full human, one whose right to existence and protection we must defend even though the sky fall. That is what I mean by a failure of imagination: their vision for the human family simply excludes those who have yet to emerge from the darkness of the womb into the light of day.

And that has been the brilliance of the focus on partial-birth abortion, since here we have a child half-born, bridging those twin worlds of the womb and our tactile, visible, everyday life. The triumph of the signing on November 5 is that through our democratic institutions we decided that this monstrous denial of human dignity must end. Whatever the courts then do with the law, our moral victory is secure.

As I watched President Bush sign his name I was put in mind of another great leader, Winston Churchill, and his comment on another turning-point in history (the allied victory in the North African campaign) – that this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end; but it is, at least, the end of the beginning.