Why I think that…

… abortion is wrong.

Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, a phrase coined by Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence is the essence of my belief on abortion. The basic human right to life is violated by an abortion on convenience.

Some argument certainly exists for abortion to save the life of the mother. When it is determined that by, continuing the pregnancy, the mother risks serious chance of death, we must make more of a Sophie’s Choice than a social choice. That is not at all my disagreement with abortion.

Argument can also be made for abortion in cases of rape. The mother did not have a choice in the creation of that pregnancy, and I could certainly believe that grievous mental harm could result from it. A whole new argument could be made here, but this is not where I find that my disagreement with abortion lies.

I am pro-choice when it comes to abortion. I believe that the woman has a choice whether or not to engage in intercourse. The woman has a choice to use cheap and easily available birth control. The woman can even choose to have an inexpensive medical procedure to avoid pregnancy permanently. With all her choices in mind, the woman realizes that, in having intercourse, even with birth control, there is a chance of a resulting pregnancy. Choosing to have sex comes with a realization of the consequences and the resultant responsibilities given to us by nature.

Choosing to kill the resultant baby because of the discomfort of pregnancy (both social and physical) should not be an option. Killing another human because you do not wish to face the consequences of your chosen action is simply monstrous. We do not legally kill our spouse when we are trapped in a bad marriage. We would not consider killing a troubled teen-ager whose activities are bringing pain and chaos to the family. We would not condone the killing of a habitual alcoholic drunken driver who kills a family of four on the highway. We have other options in these cases, painful and uncomfortable though they may be. There are also other options available to a woman who discovers that she has an unplanned pregnancy. Better options than killing.

We should learn what we are killing before making such a decision. We often cavalierly use labels to avoid the reality of what we are doing. We say zygote, or blastocyst, or organism… sometimes even non-viable tissue mass. “A six-celled zygote” can’t be medically aborted. The mother has no idea it exists. It first becomes a blastocyst and then implants in the uterine wall after about a week, becoming a fetus. The pregnancy can’t be detected until this implantation as tests rely on the existence of hCG (a hormone), not produced till implantation. By week 5, the growing human has a heartbeat and a brain. By week 6, doctors can detect brain waves and by week 10, the brain is growing at 250,000 neurons a minute. When will we decide to call it a human, and what criteria will we place in making that judgment. Should we err on the side of caution? Certainly. There very potential of a fetus’s humanity should be enough to offer it the protection of basic human rights.

It is a gray and murky area to be sure. Ideologues, blindly partisan advocates or adherents of a particular set of integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program, often support abortion without any real thought to the consequences or realities of what they wish to allow others to do. We would not put a killer to death under gray and murky circumstances (we should not do so under any, but that is another issue), perhaps we should put more thought into it before we treat an innocent human the same way.