Never let it be said I ain’t got the guts to talk about high profile topics.
The real issue, the one that is at the very heart of abortion (if you can use the word “heart” when talking about abortion), is not so much a woman’s right to decide what to do with her body, but a person’s right, woman AND man, to be irresponsible about what they do with their body.
Let’s step back a bit: let me start by stating I am against abortion (now that’s out of the way), and I want to look at both sides of this argument to try to bring out the truth behind the hype.
The Right to Life (RTL) side says abortion is murder, and the Right to Choose (RTC) side says that it is not murder because the fetus is not a human being. At least, not yet. If we define murder as the taking of a life, then stepping on an ant is murder. In that case, we better build a lot more jails, so let’s not call abortion murder for the purposes of this discussion.
The Roe vs. Wade decision was that abortion is legal so long as the fetus is not “viable”, which is defined as being able to live outside the mother’s womb, which is considered to be approx. 20 weeks of pregnancy. In other words, you are not a human being until you are able to live without being a parasite. Really- isn’t that what a fetus is? It lives inside your body and feeds off of what you eat. So, it is a parasite until it can live on it’s own outside the womb.
But does it really live outside of the womb? If you have a preemie born at 26 weeks, the odds of it’s survival are low but it is legally human, and the doctors will connect it to all sorts of feeding tubes, place it inside an incubator, etc. It may not be in it’s mothers’ womb, but it certainly isn’t living on it’s own outside of it.
In fact, any baby born before the final weeks or so of the final trimester is pretty much incapable of surviving without medical aid, so it also should be considered non-viable, but it isn’t. Therefore, the viability argument isn’t, well….viable. To be fair, we either have to reverse that decision and say that life begins at conception, or we have to consider a fetus to be non-viable until the, what? late 8th month? early 9th month? I think even those who are staunch RTLer’s would have to admit that aborting a pregnancy that late into it really is “murder.”
Let’s get back to my earlier accusation: the right to choose isn’t about the right to do what you want with your own body, it is the right to be irresponsible. I do not believe in fornication, although before I was “saved” and decided God’s laws are better for me than my own choices, I was all for fornication. Adultery was, for the record, never in my book for my own marriage, but I admit that there had been times, as a single young man, that I did not care about the marriage condition of the woman. Because I have been there and done that, I have earned the right, if you will, to say I don’t believe it is right.
But I also believe, just as strongly, that God gives each of us Free Will so that we can make our own decisions, and although He provided us with the guidance we need to make good decisions (it’s called the Bible), we are still allowed, i.e. given the right, to make our own decisions- good or bad.
But we were never given the right to be irresponsible, and that is what abortion is: the right to be irresponsible. Other than rape or incest, both the woman and the man should be responsible if they are going to copulate. When I say “be responsible” I mean that if they are going to copulate with the aim to create a baby, then go for it. Obviously, in this case, there is no need to use anything designed to prevent contraception. On the other hand, if the sex is for the sex and no baby is desired, then the responsible thing to do is to use some form of contraception.
And I don’t mean “Rhythm” method (used by most large families) or pre/post-coital contraceptive foam, or IUD’s, or anything that has less than a 99% chance of being effective. And underneath it all, if life happens, they should both be prepared to bring forth the life they create.
And yes- it is a life. Anything that has the ability to reproduce itself is alive, and the moment that zygote splits into 4 cells it is a living organism. There can’t be any reasonable argument that a zygote is not a living organism, so to abort it after conception is, by definition, killing a living organism (at this point everyone jumps in with that “viability” argument.)
I am not sure about abortion even in the case of incest or rape, and the bottom line (for me) is: What does God say about this? In the bible, He never even mentions it. That makes sense, because there was no such thing as abortion in those days. If you were a woman, you were married as a virgin, or you were a prostitute. No in-between. As a man, if you needed to “sow your wild oats”, you found a prostitute. If she had a kid, that was her problem. Since there is no such thing as abortion in the bible, we don’t have a definitive “Aye or Nay” from the Almighty.
But Steve, God says, “Thou shalt not kill!” What about that? Yes, He does, and that brings us back to the viability argument- does God mean not kill anything, or just not kill another human being? Actually, most of the time that commandment is used, it is in reference to another person. A person who is already born and out of the womb and somewhat grown. Now, if we consider that God doesn’t want us to kill anything living, then what about the sacrificial system? What about the commandments to wipe out every man, woman, child and (even) animals regarding those peoples the Children of Israel were to destroy when they first entered Canaan?
I think that God doesn’t want us to kill another living thing unless it is in accordance with His command. Then the blood guilt is on God, if you will, and not on us. We still need to go through the cleansing procedure outlined in the Torah, but the guilt is not on us. Under this understanding, an abortion is a blood guilt killing. Whether at the moment of conception or whether Mom has just broken water and is dilated at 10 cm., this is a life created by God. We are just the tools He uses to create life, but it is His creation. As He says (more than once) in the bible, God knew us from the womb. I don’t think that means from the time we were in the womb and able to answer His cell phone or able to tweet Him back, but in the womb: whether at 4 weeks or at 34 weeks, God says we are His from the moment we are IN THE WOMB.
For anyone who honors God and His Word, that should answer it. For those who don’t care about what God says, at least regarding abortion, life and fornication, then it falls back to responsibility.
So, bottom line: I don’t believe abortion is right. I accept that people have the right to decide what they want to do with their body, so long as they do not interfere with the rights of others. If a woman and a man copulate, and a pregnancy occurs, then it is their joint responsibility to give that child the same rights that they demand for themselves- the right to do what they want with their own body. Destroying that life denies the child that right. Forget about that viability thing: it is a smoke-screen designed only to form some “Point of No Return” for a legal argument.
If you want to copulate, then copulate. In your marriage, in your co-habitation, or in the backseat of your Chevy with someone you don’t even know the name of. You have a right to make your own decisions about what you do, but do not cry to me about the right to do what you want with your own body, then blatantly deny that right to another life form which isn’t even old enough to make that decision yet.
You DO have the right to do what you want to with your own body, but you don’t have the right to be irresponsible about it. If you make a baby, you need to let that baby grow up so it can have the same rights which you demand for yourself.
