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02/17/2005: "Abortion: Why I am pro-choice"
The anti-choice, so-called "pro-life" position on abortion is that one becomes a person at the moment of conception. A great many zealous, undoubtedly well-intentioned people consider abortion nothing less than the murder of babies.
I don't share that position, and here's why...
Most conceptions do not result in pregnancy. Zygotes usually fail to be accepted by the uterine lining and are flushed out with the next menses or absorbed back into the female body. Only a few "take hold", so to speak. Most die.
It's that simple. That's how a normal, natural, healthy, appropriately functioning human reproductive system operates. It is simply human nature, or (if you prefer) how God made us.
Yet, if every zygote is a person...
then the very act of attempting to reproduce...
even within traditional matrimony...
with all of the appropriate cultic sanctifications...
would nearly always be an act of murder, with the sole exception being the comparative handful of times that it actually results in pregnancy.
Why? Well, is it not murder to abandon a baby to die and not support its life?
One could not set out to even attempt to conceive a child, if every conceived zygote is a person. It would be an act of gross criminal negligence, as most such attempts would not successfully result in viable pregnancies. You'd inevitably slaughter zygotes.
And, since one would have no way of knowing beforehand if any conception would actually result in a zygote that the womb will allow to thrive -- one could not in good conscience even take the risk of trying.
If all of those zygotes are babies, and the only way to make them is to accept the fact that you'll kill far more zygotes than the number of third trimester offspring you eventually whelp, then there is only one way to avoid murder -- total and complete abstention from reproductive sex for the course of the entire human reproductive lifespan.
If there were no murders of that sort occurring, no human child could ever be born again. Imagine it. No attempts at reproduction, ever again, by anyone, anywhere. It would be turning the old religious dogma on its head -- that the only acceptable sex is, supposedly, that which is intended to result in pregnancy. For attempting to conceive a child would, almost inevitably, kill some zygotes.
Any morality that would, if universally adhered to, result in extinction of the human species is a deeply flawed morality. I don't believe God made us to be murderers.