I challange you to give me one situation, baring a threat to the mother’s health with the pregnancy and assuming a healthy fetus, where abortion is a preferable alternative.
TWO WORDS: Lisa Steinberg
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/family/lisa_steinberg/1.html
I’ll also check in as pro-choice and anti-ab, BUT here’s my standard plea for everyone to read Carl Sagan’s well thought out words:
http://www.2think.org/abortion.shtml
Basically it says that what makes us human is the human part of the brain that develops in the third trimester. You can be pro-human-life and still be comfortable with abortion in the first 3 months, when none of the things that define us as human are present. There is a whole lot of other interesting info, too.
I’ve also known rabid “anti-abortionists” who see nothing wrong with dethawing or throwing out frozen embryos. If life begins at conception, then every embryo should be gestated, even if it means forcing a woman at gunpoint to do it.
I am strongly pro-choice. I have no problem with early abortion for any reason, including the mother’s convenience.
Regarding the OP, I agree that one can be pro-choice and still feel that s/he personally would never participate in an abortion.
However, I don’t see how a strongly anti abortion or right to life person could be pro-choice. Someone who thinks abortion = murder won’t support the right of others to commit infanticide.
As an analogy, could someone be both against infanticide but pro-choice on infanticide? Suppose someone claimed s/he would never kill her/his own child, but s/he supported the right of others to do so? We wouldn’t call such a person “anti-infanticide”.
I’ve been trying to figure this out since the beginning of the thread. My thought on reading the thread title was that it’s obviously contradictory, yet most people seem to be attempting to explain how it isn’t. I guess it’s a case of taking being “against abortion” to mean you’re not pushing for it to be done Vs being “against abortion” meaning you think it’s morally wrong. Maybe.
People don’t really have different standards of morality in regard to themselves and other people, do they? It’s morally wrong for me to push an old man down the stairs to kill him, but it’s not morally wrong for Dave to do it etc.
The problem is that, while we (as a society) can agree that pushing an old man down the stairs is wrong, we don’t agree whether or not aborting a three-week old fetus is wrong. Some folks call it murder of a sapient being; others consider it ending a pregnancy before the fetus develops cognitive function.
To be pro-choice means to say “I recognize that we don’t agree on this point, so we must leave it up to each of us – as individuals – to decide according to our own beliefs.” Being pro-choice and anti-abortion means to say “I think this isn’t right, but I can’t tell you what to think, so you’ll have to decide on your own.”
(And, of course, being anti-abortion means to say, “I think this is wrong, and I’m forcing you to comply with me.”)
I am personally anti-abortion. I could never have one, and if my teenage daughter came to me and said she was pregnant, I would advise her to consider all her options. While I don’t think abortion equals infanticide, I believe it has more emotional signifigance than getting one’s gall bladder removed.
At heart, I believe no woman is happy about getting an abortion: she is forced to do so by tragic circumstances (rape, incest, medical reasons, birth control failure, inability to support child). Many women grieve for the fetus as if it was a child who died under other circumstances. That doesn’t mean that it was the wrong decision for them to make.
If abortion were illegal, women would still have them–they just probably wouldn’t survive the procedure.