My Opinion on Abortion

It’s complicated.

I don’t think abortion is a good thing. I can’t imagine, really, that anyone would. About the best thing I can say about it is that under certain conditions, it may be a lesser evil.

I know there are plenty of Americans who would disagree with that. Who think nothing could be more evil than terminating an unwanted pregnancy. Some of those people are my friends and relatives.

I take back what I said at the beginning of this post. Actually, I can state my opinion in very simple terms:

In a perfect world, there wouldn't be any unwanted pregnancies.

...and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

So why are we having this discussion? Because we don’t live in a perfect world, and we disagree vehemently, sometimes violently, on how to deal with that. Also, the subject is on my mind because tomorrow morning, a committee of the Texas Senate will hold a public hearing on a bill that would require every woman seeking an abortion to have a sonogram first and listen while the doctor describes the fetus in great detail.

I expect this hearing will be full of extreme statements from both sides, presented to legislators whose minds are already made up. Abortion is one of our most polarizing issues.

That’s too bad, because I suspect a lot of Americans, like me, are somewhere in the middle.

My personal belief (which I don’t require anyone else to follow) is that life begins at conception. On that point, I’m more or less with the Catholics. Nature shuffles the deck, puts a sperm and egg together, and you have a new set of chromosomes: a unique individual. If that embryo were in my womb, I don’t think I could cast it out. If I were a doctor, I’m not sure I would do abortions.

But still, when the pro-life/pro-choice controversy heats up, I tend to come down on the pro-choice side. For several reasons.

One, my view on when life starts – when the embryo acquires a soul, if you want to put it that way – is just one possible interpretation. I’m well aware that there are others.

Two, I’ll bet there are plenty of women out there who didn’t believe in abortion until they needed one. I can’t say for sure that I wouldn’t have been one of those, because I never found myself in that position. I made it all the way through my childbearing years without a single unwanted pregnancy. I credit that partly to due diligence, and partly to luck. Some women aren’t so lucky.

Three: As I see it, the best way to eliminate abortions is to give everyone access to reliable birth control, along with the best possible education on how to use it. I’ve noticed that many of the groups who fight against abortion also oppose birth control, which seems totally counterproductive. They shut down women’s clinics in third-world countries that are ravaged by famine. They lobby to take funding away from Planned Parenthood, which puts most of its energy into preventing unwanted pregnancies and provides basic health care to thousands of low-income women. I don’t want to hang out with people who think like that.