Today I am pro-choice. I wasn’t always this way.
I first learned of the abortion controversy when I was about 8 or 9 years old. My late evangelical Christian mother told me that evil doctors were killing babies inside the wombs of pregnant women. Dad, (who might drop in to comment below), held the more rational view that women had a right to choose. He did hold back a little for the sake of family harmony, so Mom ultimately had more influence over me on that one issue.
For a young child who was recently himself a fetus, it seemed like there was only one correct choice: it was wrong to kill unborn babies. I did know that babies came from pregnant women, but I didn’t know at the time how women became pregnant. I vaguely recall attending a rally or two.
As a preteen, I started to doubt the existence of God. But I still thought of undeveloped fetuses as unborn babies worthy of legal protection. The idea of abortion started to haunt me more: no matter how good my own life was going at the time, I still thought of all those babies being sucked out of wombs and being discarded as medical waste.
As a college freshman in 1998, I participated in a class discussion about abortion. A pro-choice classmate talked about unwanted babies. I came up with a quippy retort, “I’d rather be unwanted, than dead.” The class cheered me and the instructor said it was the smartest thing I said all semester. I actually unironically believed that it was preferable to be the neglected offspring of a unwilling mother going through the minimal motions of motherhood, or even to be a newborn infant dying inside a dumpster than to be an fetus that never sees daylight.
Sometime while in college, I began to think about it more rationally. Embryos can’t possibly have rights if they don’t have brains. Your brain is what makes you, you. Almost any other part of your body can be transplanted to or from your body: arms, legs, heart, lungs, even your face. When your brain dies, you die. When your brain doesn’t exist yet, you don’t exist yet, even if your parents are holding a gender reveal party and already picked out a name.
Now, I suppose people can have a nice healthy debate about the morality or legality of elective abortions during the third trimester. But it has taken me this long to realize that most of these “Life Begins At Conception” people just want to control women.
I’ve tried to have good faith debates with these people. They will insist that an embryo has constitutional rights because it has 46 chromosomes. I will point out that my grandma had 46 chromosomes when we had her cremated,
They will claim that my argument is absurd, because my grandma was very much dead but an embryo is still alive. I will point out that bacteria and plants are also alive, and there is a species of fern that has thousands of chromosomes.
They will get irritated, call me an idiot, and say that human embryos have human DNA. Again, my late grandmother still had human DNA within her right up until she was incinerated, and death of an individual human is defined as the death of that human’s brain. If a person stops having rights upon brain death, it follows that having a brain is a prerequisite for having rights in the first place.
At this point, they will insist that I have no brain and block me, or they will insist that the embryo contains the genes for forming a brain. I will point out that every sperm cell in my balls also has the DNA necessary for a brain. Am I morally obligated to have as much unprotected sex as possible, so that all of my sperm have a fighting chance at becoming babies? And then they block me, because I just said the quiet part out loud. While they don’t necessarily want me in particular to father any children, they want women to be pregnant as much as possible.
For decades, the GOP has talked up reversing Roe and outlawing abortion to its theocratic base. Moderate Republicans felt reassured by Roe, thinking that the SCOTUS ruling kept them from fulfilling a stupid promise. Now they are forced to choose between alienating swing voters or upsetting the MAGA crowd.
This is a gentle reminder that anyone who advocates for violence at a protest is either an undercover cop or works for the other side. Stay safe!