Sure, there's nothing that could get controversial on this topic, right?
For the record and full disclosure up front, I'm adamantly pro-choice, so whether or not you consider that to be an inherent bias, at least know that much going in.
I've heard arguments for and against abortion based on ethical issues, and neither argument, pro-choice or anti-choice, has been particularly compelling to me. The only argument against choice that I've heard that's at all logical is fundamentally and irreducibly religious.
As I understand it, to the religious anti-choice crowd, abortion is equivalent to the taking of a life, and to them, life begins at conception. That latter part doesn't make sense to me. As I recall my high-school biology, conception occurs when a living sperm cell fertilizes a living ovum cell. Everything's alive all along and nowhere in the process is "life" created in anything not already living.
No, even though they say "life begins at conception," they don't really mean "life." If conception brought life into being from non-living minerals and clay, they'd have a pretty compelling argument, but they don't mean "life" as in living or non-living. By "life," they mean an individual personality, an ego-self, a soul. A living "someone" who did not exist before conception by other living "someones."
Well, I got a problem with that. The very fact that the new living "someone" is a product of cells from other living "someones," was incubated and nurtured in the body of the female "someone," and at least until birth depended on the female's eating and breathing for nutrition and respiration just like every other organ in the female someone's body, makes me less and less sure that the so-called "new life" is really separate from the life or lives that conceived it. The closer I look at the situation, the harder and harder it is to find where one organism ends and the other begins. That's probably part of the reason that the mother-child bond is so strong throughout the higher animal kingdom - the two are really inseparable parts of the same whole.
So living cells fertilize living cells, and then the fertilized living cells continue to exist in intimate association with the body that produced it. I still don't see a "new life" or a new living "someone" there, just a continuation and extension of what already is.
What must really bother the religious anti-choicer is the existence of a new soul. Now, at this point, it probably won't surprise you to learn that I question the existence of a soul, at least as some sort of entity that lasts beyond an individual's life. The closest thing to a soul that I can see is consciousness, that luminous realization of ourselves that ties together memory, personality, and free will. And consciousness is what can be called an emergent property - it arises when a living brain of sufficient complexity becomes self-aware, and disappears when the brain is no longer functional. It's like a light bulb and illumination - there's light only as long as there's a functional bulb and a power source from which it can emerge, and whenever the power's off or the bulb is no more, no light is produced (at least from that source). Similarly, there's no consciousness or soul or atman (to borrow a Sanskrit term) that can outlast the mind from which it emerges, and there's nothing eternal to anyone. Sorry, folks, but that's just the way it is.
Even if I'm wrong, I don't understand the concern about destroying a soul if the soul is eternal - if anything, the soul is just being liberated before suffering through a lifetime of sickness, old age, and death. If the soul is eternal, it cannot be destroyed. But there is no soul, so those are just hypothetical considerations.
The decision whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is a deeply personal one for those involved. It obviously involves religious or spiritual matters for some people, as well as identity issues ("am I ready to be a parent?") in others. It's undeniably a difficult and involved decision to make one way or the other, but I really don't understand why some feel that their (in my opinion) misguided views on this whole matter need to be foisted on those making the difficult decision for themselves.
See? Nothing controversial here, folks. Just some plain common-sense considerations. Problem solved, and you're welcome.
Next we'll take on world peace, lol.
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