Abortion will be illegal again

Well again, I respect your opinion. But it doesn't make mine invalid.

I agree that what that girl said was horrific. I do not agree that it's part of the abortion issue or an indicator of the overall attitudes in our country about either abortion or the value of human life.

And that's the part where we disagree. I think that a person can value human life and still be pro choice. There are 7 billion people on this planet and who knows how many thousands more on their way right now. I care about the well being of all of them. As individuals and as members of a worldwide community of people who share one planet and its resources to live.

I do not mean to imply that any one life is more valuable than another. When putting certain concerns of a mother into the decision about whether to end a pregnancy or not, I am not assigning greater value to the mother vs. the unborn child to be. But the mother is already living and as such deserves certain considerations. In my opinion. I can believe that and still feel that abortion should always be a last option and only chosen when there are truly no other viable options. That is how I can be both pro life and pro choice (which is not at all the same as being for capital punishment and against it at the same time). Because here's what goes into the importance of the pro choice element: what determines "no other viable option"? Viable to whom? Some people would say it's cruel to force a woman who has been raped to go through 9 months of carrying a child to term where she would actually feel on a daily basis a life growing inside of her that was created by the horrific, terrifying assault she was subjected to. But how would we regulate that exception? It is extremely difficult in many cases to successfully prosecute a rape. Would a conviction be required to make a woman qualify for the exception? Would it even matter since it would take longer for the trial to conclude than the window of opportunity to terminate a pregnancy before it had progressed enough for the embryo to become a fetus and brain development to begin and change the reality of what terminating would mean at that point? And what about when there's no suspect? Could you prove rape simply from the medical evidence at hand? Would a doctor's note suffice? Then there are the people who feel strongly that it would be cruel to bring a child into the world who is likely (based on prenatal testing) to have severe, debilitating illnesses or handicaps that would force him/her to live in deep pain and/or be severly limited in their ability to function in even the simplest ways. Removing their right to choose in such a situation might, in their mind, be a bigger imposition of cruelty than abortion. How about issues of the mother's health? And at what point does it have to be certain death that she's facing in order to consider terminating her pregnancy? How about all the babies born to drug addicts that come into this world so intensely addicted to those same drugs that their brains never had the chance to develop normally and they will always suffer the effects of substances they never had any control over ingesting? For every person who says that all life is precious and those people have a right to live, however difficult and painful their lives might be, there is another person who will say that it's more cruel to continue that pregnancy to term and bring a child into the world under such painful circumstances.

How I feel about any or all of these issues specifically is not the point. The point is that all of these factors (and more) do exist and to pretend that they don't and reduce the entire discussion to "You're either adamantly pro life or you support a "culture of death"" is not only simplistic. It's inaccurate, insulting to compassionate people who just happen to have different opinions than yours, and ineffective in helping to find solutions to the very things that lead to abortion in the first place.

That was my point. And no, that's not straddling fences. That's acknowledging the world we live in and not trying to sum up the entire canvas by pretending that half the colors and pictures that make up that world don't exist when they do.