Friday, June 28, 2013

What if your mom had an abortion? How would you feel?

I would feel nothing.  I would not exist.  It's a pretty simple answer to a pretty dumb question pro-lifers like to ask to trip up pro-choice advocates.

To not exist is neither good nor bad.  It just is the case (in a negating sort of way).  So if I never existed, it would never have mattered—to anyone.  Of course, existing now matters to me and others who love me, but if I never was, I’d never care and neither would anyone else.  There would be no me.  And that would have been fine.

But to use the kind of argument as the questions above give is to commit a gross error.  It demeans women who have become pregnant by telling them they have no free will over their bodies.  In the (usually) well-intentioned efforts of pro-life advocates to esteem the personhood of the unborn, they take away the personhood of the already born.  This is a case of mixed-up priorities.  To be pro-choice means that one fully respects the personhood of the woman just as I would want everyone to respect my own personhood.


I can say what I say because I exist.  But if I didn’t exist, so be it.  There would be no skin off my back (literally and figuratively).  Pro-lifers need a new argument.

4 comments:

  1. Well said! It is very important not to lose sight of the life that is already born and who must be given the right to make their own choices.
    Much of the 'pro-life' coverage of abortion in my home country, Ireland, regard the rights of the woman as secondary to those of the unborn and I cannot understand it. It is particularly difficult to understand when the woman's life is at risk. The tragic and preventable death of Savita Halappanavar in an Irish hospital (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Savita_Halappanavar) due to the failure to have a non viable fetus removed has reignited the abortion debate in Ireland, a county where even medical abortions are still illegal. I can see that the abortion issue is also very contentious on the other side of the Atlantic.
    RobinK

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  2. Religion - every human, including every potential human, is precious and must be saved because it is God's intention for that human to be born - and you can't mess with God's intention. It's another soul that God has helped deliver to the world, and you want to take it away.
    Religion is the context in which many people who are against abortion actually think about abortion. They do not think about it biologically, physically, or scientifically at all. They think of it religiously and irrationally. What I really don't understand is that pro-lifers probably think they are being so very compassionate and righteous by protecting the lives of the unborn, but then when the unborn is actually born and brought into a world where it doesn't have a stable family or any real support in order for it to live a good life, those pro-lifers have moved on, and do they think about how children who might have been aborted are growing up in a world of suffering and immense struggle because they had very little to be born to? Do they think about how much the child-bearer has to struggle just to keep the child(ren) alive and nourished? No - pro-lifers are too busy to think of these things because they're too busy hating on everyone who is on welfare trying to support their kid(s), preaching that they shouldn't be having any kids if they can't take care of them (at least that's how it pretty much is in America).

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  3. Omigosh I just thought - it's a good thing Jesus Christ wasn't aborted. Then we'd all be really screwed.

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