First of all, I want to praise all women that choose to have a child. They are the ones that carry the enormous weight of propogating the species and that's pretty cool.
I was thinking about issues of morality and how I feel about things in regards to life and death and pregnancy. I have always been officially on the side of prochoice but I was never quite sure why. I guess it was just a gut feeling but I think I figured it out.
Let's face it, our society condones specific types of murder. We have war and the death penalty. No matter what you say about the reasons or the justifications, murder is murder. We have, as a society, legitimized them.
One thing we cant seem to agree on is if abortion should be allowed or if it should even be considered murder. At first, I bought into all of the arguments that say that a fetus is not actually a life for a period of time. Ins ome ways, those arguments do make sense. For a period of time, this organism growing and organizing itself in a womb is nothing more than a cluster of cells with no thoughts or consciousness. How do we know when that changes, though? We kill cells all the time by drinking too much or doing something else unhealthy. Heck, we can cut a piece of skin off and that is cellular murder. When does that pivotal change happen that gives this organism the necessary consciousness to truly experience the pain of death as a human does. When does it feel the agony of abortion? Why is this so wrong if the body seems to do it on a whim. It is basic knowledge that a woman's body will give priority to the woman's life if it has to choose between the two. I think that's something we can all agree on. If a woman's life is in danger, we should terminate a pregnancy. However, the woan's right to do it whenever she chooses is something I'm struggling with. Part of me wants to say that it is her body and she should be able to do with it as she pleases but another part reminds me that this creature inside the woman might actually be a tiny human being, capable of pain. I guess what I'm saying is that I can't even decide and it will never be my burden. I can't imagine ever having to contemplate this with the weight of real consequences hanging over my head.
Then again..... I'm tempted to go down another train of logic. Nature has its own rules. These rules, call them divine animal law, are pretty simple. Animals exhist to live as long as they can so that they can pass down as much of their DNA as they can. Some animals can ovulate voluntarily while others can abort fetuses simply by willing it. It seems that in the animal world, you have to look out for number one. Whether that means eating or surviving by removing a predator or a pregnancy, it can involve some form of murder.
Human beings, however, are special kinds of animals. We reject so much of the natural world. We've abandoned natural selection, some of us are actually vegetarians and we do things that animals would never do. That's not to say we have completely abandoned this "divine animal law". The question is, how much and which parts of this do we want to hold onto?
Postscript: I'm still going to support the prochoice agenda until I can definitively decide otherwise.
