As a progressive woman who has admired U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar for her thinking views, I was cheered by her decision to run for president — and then extremely disappointed by her vote against the Born Alive Abortion Survivor Protection Bill.

She just followed the pack and the unthinking position that to vote against any abortion-rights position is to vote against women.

When will our leaders start to use science (medical evidence) and ethics to discuss abortion instead of emotions and the idea of unlimited rights?

How sad it is that Republicans cannot use science and ethics in considering pollution and climate change, while most Democrats cannot use them in considering abortion. When is either party going to grow up and realize that there are no unlimited rights in life? Not for women or the unborn or gun owners or polluters or land owners, to name a few.

All ethics are dependent upon reasonable limitations of rights to avoid harm to others and infringing on their rights.

Can we really talk about saving endangered species or caring for children's health when we are not protecting our own premature children — especially when so many infertile couples are longing for children to adopt?

Can we really talk of protecting the unborn when our pollution from mountaintop-removal coal mining, fracking, coal-burning power plants and chemical production are causing spontaneous abortions, birth defects, learning disabilities and childhood cancers?

It's time both parties grow up out of their unlimited, unthinking stances and decide to look at public health statistics and realities. Children in the womb in the late second and third trimesters are not simply fetal protoplasm that are the property of the women bearing them. They are children, as any parent or health care provider of a premature child born at these stages will tell you. It is infanticide to let them die. Children don't change their nature in the birth canal or through caesarean births or abortions. Can Democratic presidential candidates just admit this honestly?

It seems NARAN and its unlimited-rights rhetoric runs the left as much as the NRA and the oil and gas industries rule the right. Neither the Democrats nor Republicans appear courageous enough to bring our nation together with some reasonable understanding of rights, responsibilities, ethics — and a full understanding of creating a united path for the common good — caring for women, children, our planetary systems and our future.

I hope Sen. Klobuchar will consider the abortion issue with more subtlety and moral leadership in the future to match her more thinking and moral stands on other life issues.

Marybeth Lorbiecki, of Hudson, Wis., is director of Interfaith Oceans (www.interfaithoceans.org) and author of "A Fierce Green Fire: Aldo Leopold's Life and Legacy" and "Following St. Francis: John Paul II's Call for Ecological Action."