A Point I Feel Needs To Be Made (Abortion. You Have Been Warned. )

So, I was having a civil discussion with someone on Facebook this morning on a controversial topic, namely abortion.

I know!

Who even does that?

Civil discussion, pffffft.

Predictably, a name-calling troll showed up; unsurprisingly, to "support" my argument by calling the other person an idiot, thus reducing my argument to "the thing that guy who was on the same side as that other asshole said," which I didn't appreciate at all.

So, since I think the point I was making is important and valid, I'm going to make it here, instead, where I literally cannot be interrupted.

So.

Abortion.

Abortion is, and should be, a huge decision.

I'm going to talk a bit about the nature of that decision, and of the rhetoric surrounding it.

I am only peripherally going to discuss my stance and feelings about that decision, promise.

Abortion is, literally, a life or death decision.

The person making that decision is choosing literally between life and death for a human being.

And that right there is what brought this about.

Because a bunch of you, reading that, knee-jerked "in the first trimester it's not a human being yet, " and I want to make you revisit that.

Let's examine it.

There are only a few possible outcomes to a pregnancy.

It can result in a healthy baby.

It can result in an unhealthy baby.

It can result in a dead baby.

It cannot, however, result in anything that isn't a baby.

No office chairs can pop out of your womb.

You cannot give birth to a car, or an avocado.

It is impossible for a human pregnancy to result in anything other than a human.

So saying it is a "clump of undifferentiated cells," or a "non-viable tissue mass," or any other term besides "baby," is a dodge.

The problem with that dodge is that it robs a literally life-or-death, irreversible decision of much of its weight and importance.

It's way easier to end the existence of a clump of non-differentiated cells than it is to kill a baby.

Now, having used that phrase, I'm sure quite a few of you are thinking, "oh, ok, I know where this guy stands now."

I assure you that you do not, so I will briefly digress to explain my actual stance on abortion.

Myself, personally, I would not make that decision, or support it, in any case other than medical necessity or loss of agency.

Remember that last phrase, because it will become important.

The thing is, despite the fact that *I personally* wouldn't make that decision unless I felt it was unavoidable, I also don't believe the federal government has the right, reason, or  justifiable power to pass laws about it. It is a reproductive choice, involving at most - at absolute most - two people, in each case: except in cases of loss of agency, in which case there's only one person involved, the only people responsible for that decision are the parents.

This is not something rightly solved by federal law. Maybe not even state law.

I will explain that specific point in another article, because it by itself needs significant expansion.

But in brief, for those among you who don't read this site normally, and only found this on Facebook, the same principle of agency applies to lawmaking.

The larger the scale of the political unit involved, the more difficult it is to opt out of unfair or unethical laws. When your town passes a local ordinance that you can't live under, just opting out of that by moving is outside the capacity of a lot of people.

Much more so, for states.

Far, far more so for an entire country.

It is therefore the responsibility of government, at each level of scope and power, to consider the difficulty of that option when making laws, because passing huge laws your citizens cannot escape and cannot prevent is loss of agency - there's that phrase again - and that's morally wrong.

So, back to abortion.

We have a nominally democratic, representative form of government, which universally is the cover used by our legislators when they pretend the ability to opt out actually still exists on the level of federal laws.

"If you don't like it, vote for someone who..."

What?

How do you conclude that sentence in an honest way?

"Better represents your interests" ?

Because none of them do, regardless of the campaign speeches.

"Will work to help you" ?

Because that exact "help me, fuck them" mentality is what got us where we are today.

There's no real, honest answer to that, because both the speaker and listener know that that phrase is code for "now that I'm in office,  I don't have to listen to you, so fuck off. "

So when you're talking about federal laws around abortion, you're really talking about a small group of very rich people making huge,  life-altering decisions for millions upon millions of people; and those decision-makers are,  almost universally,  held to be exempt from the laws they pass.

So.

I don't personally think abortion is the right choice in the overwhelming majority of cases.

But I also don't believe I have the right to make that decision for you, or you for me.

What I do think is that it should be a bitterly hard decision to make.

Not needlessly cruel - that whole business of forcing pregnant women to look at their ultrasounds before making that decision is so ham-handedly awful it makes me want to hit somebody - but hard.

Because a pregnancy cannot result in anything other than a baby.

If the situation leading you to make the decision of whether or not to abort is sufficiently important to you that it outweighs the life of your child, and you make the decision honestly and on that basis, then you made the right choice for you.

It would never be the right choice for me, but it doesn't have to, because I'm not you.

Lying to yourself about what that decision really is, is always the wrong way.

Always.

Because killing your child is a choice that can come back to haunt you.

If you accept that that's what it is, at the time, you may cry, you may be hurt, but you will heal and move on.

If you lie to yourself, one day those lies will fall apart, and then there's a pretty good chance you will, too.