In his press conference today on the latest outbreak of the Zika virus, which can very rarely cause serious birth defects such as microencephaly, President Obama made an unexpected mistake. He warned of the possible consequences for “pregnant women and their babies.” That’s a bigger unforced error than anything Donald Trump said all week.

President Obama, usually so sleekly polished and careful in his choice of words, let slip the one word his party considers unspeakable when it comes to pregnancy: “babies.” As Jason Jones and I noted in our column on the Democrat platform, its language about abortion never mentions unborn children, not even once — as if the condition which abortion is meant to “treat” had nothing to do with mammalian reproduction, or the biological reason that sex exists in the first place. You would think from the Democrats’ language that pregnancy were an abdominal inflammation caused by a mosquito bite.

Freud said that slips of the tongue often reveal key truths that we hide from ourselves, especially those nestling just beneath the surface, which we suppress because they disturb us. And there is nothing more menacing to our current sexual culture than the face of a baby. It’s like the skull that sits at the vanity table in a seventeenth century painting.

A friend of mine who had an unexpected baby right after college recounted that when she brought the little boy to campus and pushed him around in a stroller, the college girls flinched and recoiled from it, as if he somehow threatened them. Most of them were having sex — albeit, mostly bad, half-hearted sex, since this is Yale we’re talking about — and the one thing that gave them nightmares was sex’s ugliest possible outcome: pregnancy. So that cute little infant she propelled through the gothic courtyards was to these young, fertile women like a tiny gargoyle who’d come to life on the library roof and leaped down to start attacking people.

I’ve often wondered how pro-choice women who choose to get pregnant can still take ultrasounds of their “products of conception,” post them on Facebook, and coo about them with friends. When workers at Planned Parenthood get pregnant, do they tape up ultrasound pictures inside their cubicles at work? Are they worried that one of their colleagues might come by and mark them with a price-gun?

In fact, there is willed schizophrenia at work among pro-choice parents. They use the “b-word” and look out for their unborn children’s health. Sometimes they strap headphones on mama’s abdomen and play the little tyke some Mozart, in the hope of raising the IQ of that little “product of conception.” They buy clothes, plan, and dream about their children. They do this because they’re still human, as slave traders were human when they pried open the mouths to check the teeth of other humans whom they were pricing before an auction. They were simply human beings who were lying to themselves, to abet a monstrous evil which they fully knew was wrong.

But they kept up a constant patter inside their minds to drown out the still small voice that told the truth. That patter comes in handy. Whether it misuses Bible verses to justify human slavery, or mangles the facts of science to make excuses for abortion, that eager little voice which each of us has at the ready is usually good at deflecting feelings of guilt. Our reason is fallen, along with our wills, and we can easily make it our whore. To break through this moral static, it takes an irruption of Something Else, of the same “Amazing Grace” that saved the slave trader who wrote that stirring song.

Here’s hoping Barack Obama sits down tonight to really think about what he said. Let’s pray that one verse of that song — which he has led in chorus, inside a church in Charleston — becomes persistent in his mind: “Was blind, but now I see.”