Last week over 500 female athletes filed a brief against the Mississippi abortion law because, apparently, irresponsible sex is the only approach for any good female athlete. This week the tiny nation of San Marino legalized abortion over the pope's protest that it is murder. Of course, the big abortion news is the Texas law. Chicago activists are protesting the Texas pro-life law. Texas anti-life advocates petitioned the Supreme Court to intervene. Law enforcement warns of a "credible threat" against Texas legislators who voted for life. The House passed abortion legislation challenging Texas's law. Uma Thurman spoke out about how her abortion and how it made her the wonderful person she is today. In short, there is a lot of thrashing about over whether or not a baby has any right to live, and they're leaning heavily toward a resounding "No!"
The pro-life side says life begins at conception. Science says life begins as conception. (That is, what exists at conception is life and is human and, if it goes through its normal growth processes will continue to be human until it dies of old age ... as a human. There is no artificial "at this point it is not human and then, as it passes through the birth canal, it is" kind of thing.) The pope says life begins at conception. But, of course, the rest all argue against it. Well, no, not so much. They discard the argument out of hand and argue for "a woman's right to choose" without regard to the life of the child. "You're not pro-life," they like to argue, "because you don't adopt every unwanted child." Like that's a meaningful argument? Makes no sense. (And if that is a rational argument, doesn't the fact that pro-choicers don't adopt every unwanted child prove they are also anti-life? Did they "prove" too much?)
Here's my simple position. I'm pro-life. I believe that we should not kill innocent humans. So I oppose killing innocent old humans, innocent mid-life humans, innocent young adult humans, innocent teenage humans, innocent ... humans at any age from conception through death. You might note that at no time did I say I was "anti-abortion." That's because I'm not. I'm pro-life. If we had the technology to terminate a pregnancy for a woman for whatever reason and continue the life of that embryo, I wouldn't protest that abortion. If abortion didn't kill an innocent human, I wouldn't protest it. I'm not anti-abortion; I'm anti-killing-innocent-people.
The opposite side has a problem, however. While they like to hang the "anti-abortion" and even "anti-choice" sign on people like me, they refuse the obvious "pro-abortion" or even "pro-murder" tags for themselves. Now, I just pointed out why mine is not an anti-abortion, but a pro-life view. It is my deep fear that the same doesn't work in reverse. I fear that a disproportionately large number of women, finding themselves pregnant at an inopportune time and given the option to terminate the pregnancy without terminating the life, would reject that option. One reason I think that is the relatively small number of such women who opt to have their baby adopted at birth rather than kill it before birth. But in conversations with others, it seems as if many could not tolerate the idea that a baby of theirs was "out there someplace" and would choose, instead, to make sure ... it wasn't.
I favor life. I don't demand pregnancy; if you could terminate a pregnancy without terminating a life, I'd have little to say. You can't rightly label me "anti-abortion." I'm afraid that today's culture so overtly and blatantly embraces a "me above all else" philosophy that most on the other side would not be able to make the same claim. They would rightly be "anti-life" in these cases. But, then, in a society governed by "the god of this world" (2 Cor 4:4), we should expect that the only labels allowed will be the ones that favor the sin.
3 comments:
The "if" is the key. "IF" one could terminate a pregnancy without terminating the life of the child, then I could also say that I'm not "anti-abortion". As I'm not sure that's possible to date, I am indeed as anti-abortion as I am pro-life, if not more so...killing babies being extremely objectionable to me.
What's strange and incomprehensible is the fact that too many on the pro-abortion side don't understand that pregnancy is a reasonably predictable outcome of sex, and that there are multiple ways to prevent pregnancy long before abortion is an option. As you said, it's much more about trying to avoid the consequences of irresponsible sexual behavior, than it is about anything else.
There's a meme going around that suggests that of pro-life folks would agree to child support, and all sorts of other things from conception, that the pro-abortion folks would magically become pro-life. First, I suspect that most pro-life folks would make that deal readily. Second, I suspect that most pro-abortion folks would find another excuses to be pro-abortion of #1 happened. Third, this undercuts the feminist argument that insists that men have not role in any aspect of a woman's pregnancy.
Coherent reasoning is not necessarily a part of the pro-abortion argument.
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