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.

Selective reasoning on what is fantasy (by anon)

The most shocking realization I had in my conversion experience out of Christianity was seeing how deeply rooted the Christian mythology was in me.  Basically, Christianity says that we are all sick, some guy came down out of nowhere and had to die this horrible death, he miraculously comes back to life after a brutal murder, but we have to wash ourselves in his blood, and only then are we made healthy and can go to heaven.  This seems so natural to believe as a Christian, especially when one grows up in the church.  Those are beliefs that feel like home.  BUT when I take a step back and look at them more objectively, they just seem crazy.  I can’t be clean until some guy dies for me – and he died over 2000 years ago?  I have to be cleansed in this guy’s blood?  How can this story ring anything but fantasy?  If someone said that the spaghetti monster requires that I eat some of his noodles and sauce for me to be allowed in his heaven, I’d say he’s nuts.  I thought that Mormonism was nuts for saying that Mohammed and his horse were raised to heaven at the Dome of the Rock.  Who’s ever seen anyone rise up to the clouds without mechanical aid?  So if I think these kinds of stories are fictions, how can I think any differently about the whole “Jesus’ body and blood will save me” theory?  If an alien species came down to Earth and learned about this, they would surely perceive Christians as no different than how we view ancient Greek mythology.

The moral of this is the age-old notion that if one is too close to something, one may not see it clearly.  I allowed myself to take a step back and it was quite eye-opening for me.  I was selectively choosing what was fantasy and what was not fantasy, when it was clear that it was all fantasy.