Abortion
On the topic of abortion I reluctantly admit that I am pro-choice leaning. That sounds like political double speak and I will do my best to clarify what that means.
Abortion is an issue that I have flip flopped on several times over the course of my life, trying to figure out what the correct answer is. I don’t think I, nor anyone else, will ever know the ‘correct’ answer. Once again, a complex issue has been boiled down to a binary decision, and that hurts us all. I think we should be able to agree that abortion is nothing to be proud of, nor a happy situation to consider. In essence, if there were 0 abortions in the world, I would consider that a good thing, the same way I would consider 0 cancers to be a good thing. But the world isn’t perfect and we have to deal with reality.
There are situations were women are raped into pregnancy. There are situations were a woman’s life is in danger should the pregnancy be taken to full term. I do not have the morality to force a woman, threw law, to give birth in those situations.
There are others ‘pro-choicers’ out there who are really pro-abortion. They celebrate an abortion as some glorious trophy of modern feminism. They encourage abortion, as an empowering act for women to strike against men. They seek legislation to include late term and post birth abortion. They want abortion funded with tax payer dollars. Furthermore, they seek to limit access to adoption. These are extremes that I cannot champion.
I don’t consider abortion a valid form of birth control. Access to male and female birth control puts the responsibility on the adults involved. And yet there are extreme pro-lifers that want to ban condoms and female birth control medication. This extreme viewpoint along with bans to morning after pills is NOT legislation that I will vote for. Some pro-lifers have a moral framework that includes pro-life while shaming unmarried parent(s).
Regardless of your age, sex, marital status, or financial status, please join me in a hypothetical. Pretend like you found out tomorrow that you were going to become an unplanned parent. What would you do? That should be a question you can answer now before you actually have to. If your answer was to take the pregnancy to term, then that is your decision. If your answer was to get an abortion, then get an abortion as early as possible in the pregnancy. The concept of a later term abortion sickens me. Where do we draw the line of creating a human? At conception? birth? 1st, 2nd, or 3rd trimester? Every person has an opinion on where that line must be drawn in the sand and there will never be a consensus on that position.
If you want to terminate an unplanned pregnancy, then do it. That being said our society should not champion this decision as something that takes 9 months to figure out. Figure it out now, and proceed to do your humanly best to never be in the situation to make such a decision.
In short, I believe abortion is a religious decision. Therefor the government cannot make that decision. I believe that society’s emotional baggage with the abortion issue is more of a symptom of a greater disease. The fact that we have people in their young 20s saddled with copious amounts of debt with a degree giving them negligible job skills for an underpaying job has destroyed the traditional family. Fixing our society to encourage the traditional family; rather than shame it, will help fix the issue of abortion.
