Life, and the life of the soul, begin at conception. Life is sacred. All life is sacred. I am morally opposed to the malicious taking of any life, but the concept of choice is a legal one, not a moral one.
I choose life for myself and the children I bore, because I am inherently selfish and fluffy. I choose for no other woman because I am an American. It is the precise separation of religion and law that allows disparate faiths to thrive alongside one another, including disparities within religions, such as Catholics and Methodists. The American attitude of freedom of religion and the separation of church and state has ensured our safety in the practice of our beliefs, and our rights are not dependent upon the morality of the privileged few, but rather on higher ideals of justice, equality, and freedom.
I am pro-choice because it is the only moral choice to make when it involves other people.
Without choice, there can be no morality at all.
A woman who becomes pregnant has not just her unborn child to consider, but also any other children she may currently have, her own body, and other people dependent upon her. She is the custodian for all of them. She must be allowed the freedom to choose to add this unborn child to the family or to abort it for the greater good of those already born. If we take away that choice, then the unborn baby may be saved but at the cost of a far greater evil to the woman and to those already born.
Is it better to allow a woman her choice, knowing she may choose to abort in some cases, or do we remove that choice and most assuredly commit evil in every single case?
Life must be protected. There is no doubt about that. As a woman, it is my duty to protect the life of my unborn child, not the government’s, not some preacher’s, certainly not yours.
The welfare of the developing embryo is, like the embryo’s own tissues, too caught up in the mother’s own existence to be considered separately. The distinction between mother and child occurs gradually. In the beginning, when there is no distinction, when the embryo is incapable of independent viability, it is and must be entirely and completely the mother’s decision on how to safeguard all the lives within her care, from her own and the already-born to the unborn within her. The mother can, should, indeed, must, protect herself first, because she must be healthy and able to care for those dependent upon her. Then she must protect the already born who are in her care – whether those are older children of hers, her elderly parents or grandparents, cousins, kin, mates, mates’ kin, co-workers, neighbors. She has a large group of people to consider, not just the one unborn child.
Life must be protected, and the question becomes, whose life?
The pro-life argument is not one of law or physical technicalities, but of the spirit. It is not life with which they are concerned, but the soul. Let me address that from my own Numenist perspective. To have any integrity of the human soul at all, we must be allowed to know, and knowing, to choose our path. To remove a person’s right to choose is tantamount to gainsaying the spiritual concept of free will. Free will is an important part of Numenism. Those who would prevent a woman from making a choice to bear or abort the unborn embryo may think they are stopping a terrible crime, but what they are actually doing is harming everyone – everyone connected with the woman, everyone in that woman’s neighborhood, society, culture, and religion. They are stifling spiritual growth, playing god in an unhealthy way, and abusing the intelligence granted us.
It is fine to be pro-life. If you can change someone’s mind with love, compassionate words, and physical support, so much the better. If you offer real support and not just pretty rhetoric, if you provide financial and physical and emotional support and care for the woman and child after the unborn is born, so very much the better. It is not acceptable on a spiritual level to force someone to make choices they would not make just because you feel it is the right thing for them to do. It is not acceptable to force a woman to bear a child she cannot care for on her own and then abandon her once the child is born. The child is more precious than the fetus, and should not be treated with less love or care. It is not fine to be pro-life if your concept of “life” ends at birth.
This isn’t about “killing babies”, it is about the freedom of the human soul. It is about being allowed to choose our destinies. It is about being allowed to have respect for our own reproductive lives, and it is about having no shame when we protect ourselves by doing what we must.
I could never ask a woman to risk her life for a pregnancy she did not want. I could never ask a woman to shoulder a lifetime responsibility she does not feel she can bear with grace. I could never presume to make a life-altering decision for anyone not myself. I didn’t even have my son circumcised so he could make that decision for himself when he was old enough. How could I have the utter arrogance to decide if a woman would bear child or not?
I believe that abortion is the taking of a life, but it is not murder. There is no negative stigma of a woman choosing to preserve the emotional, physical, and mental well being of her life and the lives of those already dependent upon her. Abortion is a method of self-defense and protection for her and her world. To label a woman who has had to choose an abortion with the same name as the people who deliberately drown their children or shoot them or starve them is a disservice to the soul of society. And when we burden society’s soul with too many negatives, it responds in harmful ways. Those already born become less valuable, more disposable. People who know their post-fetal lives are not valued in turn place little value on other people; and violence, greed, and callousness become common.
The reality of abortion is not black or white. It is not good or evil. It is human struggle, filled with blood and grief and fear and pain and humiliation. Nobody plans to get pregnant just so they can have an abortion. Abortion is not used as a primary method of birth control, not by any sane, valued being. Birth control methods fail, and abortion is a back-up for that. Men take advantage of women via rape, and abortion is there to help protect the woman from one major consequence of the man’s violent act. Only the woman can determine if she is capable of caring for a pregnancy forced on her through violence, or through failed birth control.
And that brings us to what our society would consider the dark side of abortion and what I consider the bright side of it. Relief. Abortion is a safety valve for families. The choice to abort or not allows the woman and her family freedom and safety. It is a considered action that dignifies the value of human life and the human soul by considering all parts of the equation and not just the one unknown cipher. Like any act of great human consequence, there are times when abortion is the right and only thing to do, and times when it is a terrible mistake. The pregnant woman is the only one who can make that decision, and once made, we, as a society, cannot ethically and morally judge her choice, not and remain a moral and ethical society.
Who are we to second-guess her choice, a choice that is never as simple or easy as it sounds?
We have the wealth, the technology, and the ability to make every child born a wanted child, to prevent unwanted pregnancies, to safely abort dangerous or unwanted pregnancies, to provide support while any children are entirely dependent upon the mother, to make families stronger and safer.
But we don’t.
As a society, we Americans devalue the mother, we force women into untenable positions to assuage the vocal demands of a small special interest group, we force children into untenable lives of poverty and violence, we make all of society colder, meaner, and more selfish, and we do this by preventing women from being honored, from making the hard choices they must make. Abortion is not easy. It is as life-altering a decision as giving birth, and there’s not a woman who has had an abortion who doesn’t regret the need for that decision. They may not regret the decision itself, they may rejoice that they could have that choice, but they will always regret the need that forced the decision upon them.
Women, and men who genuinely cared about women, fought long and hard to give women human rights – the right to vote, to own property, to sign contracts, to have control over their fertility, to get better, gender-specific healthcare. We don’t have full human rights for women yet, and we’ve taken some serious back-steps recently, so the struggle isn’t over by any means. Women want and need to be able to control their fertility. Many women are pro-active when it comes to their fertility – using birth control pills, using diaphragms and spermicides, and trying to get tubal ligations. Abortion is the last stand, the final choice when all other methods fail or are denied to the woman.
This isn’t even addressing the primary reason for allowing women to make the choice to carry or abort the pregnancy – the spiritual growth that such decisions will bring. By abrogating the woman’s right to choose, we stunt her spiritual growth.
Perhaps there are those who want women to remain spiritually small and weak, they are themselves small-spirited.
There are those who will cry out, “But what about the father’s right to choose?”
And to them I answer: The father’s right to choose takes place before the act of coitus and orgasm. He can choose to control his fertility through condoms and spermicides and even through vasectomy. Once he decides to squirt his unprotected sperm and conception occurs, he hands over the decision for what happens next to the woman. It is her body, her life, her family, her community, her spiritual well-being that informs her decision.
She may choose to allow him a part in her decision, but it is ultimately and completely her decision, because it is her life that is now at risk. Pregnancy carries a high mortality rate – pregnancy is the main cause of death for women of reproductive age all around the world. Some pregnancies develop into cancers instead of babies (http://www.merck.com/mmhe/sec22/ch252/ch252h.html) . Even in otherwise healthy pregnancies, the woman suffers permanent physical damage, from minor damage like hemorrhoids or varicose veins to organ failure. It’s scary, being pregnant (http://www.americanpregnancy.org/pregnancycomplications/index.htm). And it ends with childbirth, a painful event that carries many complications from an episiotomy to a caesarean, from a damaged bladder to fatal hemorrhaging. One in four pregnancies end in a natural miscarriage, which tells us clearly that
Many women in a loving relationship with the father of their embryo will discuss it with him, and allow him a large part in the decision. Even in a committed and loving relationship, she still needs to know that if she needed an abortion, it would be available for her safely and legally. Sometimes, things go wrong even in what starts as a normal and healthy pregnancy and it must be terminated for the health and well-being of the mother.
One bad pregnancy doesn’t always prevent a woman from trying again later when conditions are better. An abortion in that case would actually be a boon because she will have the ability to correct a health issue and have children later in life. An abortion doesn’t mean a woman will never want children, it only means she can’t have one right then.
If a man wants a child that badly, he might be happier if he chooses to sire a child with a woman who wants him and his baby instead of trying to force a woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant to have his baby. Mandatory motherhood is not good for anyone.
Because pregnancy is not the quick and easy physical act that male orgasm is, the choice must remain hers until we develop something along the lines of the Bujoldian uterine replicators. When we have artificial wombs that put no woman’s life at risk to carry a baby to term, that involve no woman’s emotions, bodies, or families; then men can decide to take custody of the embryo, grow it in the artificial womb, and raise it himself.
When women can walk away from the pregnancy as easily as men can, then men can decide.
So, if men want to make that decision, to take the lifetime responsibility of growing and rearing a child, they should hustle and develop working artificial wombs as soon as they can.
