Why I am pro-choice.

I didn't become pro-choice all at once. I was raised Catholic.

First I had to understand the basis for believing an abortion, at least in the early- to mid-term, was a sin or murder. The moral arguments are based on:

1) the fetus has a soul. Variant: the fetus is a child and a person;

2) never mind one, god counts it as murder to refuse his most wonderful gift of a new life;

3) creating new life is god's sacred choice, not ours;

4) since every sperm is sacred, a whole fetus is like killing Christ himself;

5) abortions look like really bad sin (just look those pictures!);

6) the women who have them are whores, and maybe even the Whore(s) of Babylon;

7) don't make God angry, be prudent and err on the side of caution;

8) life begins at conception;

9) it says so in the Bible

10) we know the Bible doesn't say anything about abortion, but we know it's a sin anyway;

11) sex is a bad sin to begin with, so getting away with it scot-free is even worse;

12) because the threat of pregnancy (and disease) is the best way to keep women from bringing sin on mankind (. . . again) and keep men from being tempted to sin (as always).



I'm hoping I didn't forget any. I couldn't help getting comical about some of them, but I'm not trying to set up a straw man, honest, that's what their arguments are. I also tried to keep out inferred motivations, but go on the arguments anti-choicers have made. Most of them express several of these beliefs, and shift conversations or writings from one to another.

I only give merit to the first. Of the rest: two, three and four depend on very specific religious dogma, an argument from authority. Five is witless, actually just a propaganda tool. Six and eleven require a mean judgment of women based purely in sexism, and nine and ten are non sequiturs, with nine being authoritarian. Eight is a scientific absurdity, and nine is a falsehood.

It's possible to believe the 7th with some merit, because the Christian God (and in fact the Muslim and Jewish God) punishes nations for sins along with individuals. That happens in the Old Testament, and it's warned about in the New Testament, and it makes sin a matter of national concern, not individual choice. So, if you're an adherent to any of those religions, it is perfectly logical to be prudent about God's punishment, but it only has merit if one of the other arguments does. It's also questionable whether so much prudence is needed concerning an act that isn't mentioned in the Bible, which can only be supported by the weakest inferences from passages about infant sacrifice.

So, I'm left with argument one. Unfortunately, we cannot detect or observe a soul or when it is created or develops. Also, thorough observation of pregnancy shows that the "hand of god" is completely missing from the whole process, which in fact proceeds automatically. Lacking anything else, we have to rely on purely on observation, and apply reasonable morality to it.

A fact that is very clear from human interaction, we treat a human form as a person due to it showing consciousness, or inferring that it can gain consciousness. There's no real interaction otherwise. Consciousness is the quality a human form has to have before it becomes a human being, a person, and is considered to have a soul. I suggest that is the basis we should choose. If it's immediately capable of gaining consciousness, or has ever been conscious, then it is s a person.

I would say, then, that it's probably in the fifth month that the "personhood" be considered.

And because of that, I'm pro-choice.