Blogging for Choice

Last year, when I wrote this, things had gotten worse since the previous year. This past year has been even worse for women and children. In the news, we still read stories of women “being raped”, not of “men raping women”, and watched court cases of rape victims being further victimized. We’ve seen the Department of Health and Human Services pass a regulation that allows any employee in the health care industry decline to services based on the employee’s morals, and screw the patient. This has resulted in a nurse-practitioner “accidentally” removing IUDs from patients. We’ve seen more women and children becoming homeless because they weren’t allowed a choice that could have prevented the whole problem. We have people actively and vociferously advocating having babies - in spite of the fact that we are breeding ourselves out of resources.

More and more, we need to take control of our reproduction, to stem the constant increase in our population. We need to consider the welfare of those who are already born and living in this world. We need to care for those who are alive now, and in need now.

I believe life, and the life of the soul, begins at conception. I do not believe sentience begins at conception. That is something that develops when the vessel it is meant to inhabit matures enough to nourish the seed of sentience and nurture it to fruition. Life is sacred. All life is sacred. I am morally opposed to the malicious taking of any life, but I believe life that already exists independently takes precedence over a potential life. Choice must be moral, ethical, and legal. Let me explain.

I choose life for myself and the children I bore, because I am inherently selfish and fluffy. I choose for no other woman because I am an American. It is the precise separation of religion and law that allows disparate faiths to thrive alongside one another, including disparities within religions, such as Catholics and Methodists. The American attitude of freedom of religion and the separation of church and state has ensured our safety in the practice of our beliefs, and our rights are not dependent upon the morality of the privileged few, but rather on higher ideals of justice, equality, and freedom.

I am pro-choice because it is the only moral choice to make when it involves other people.

Without choice, there can be no morality at all. There can only be slavery.

Consider. A woman who becomes pregnant has not just her unborn child to consider, but also any other children she may currently have, her own body, and other people dependent upon her. She is the custodian for all of them. She must be allowed the freedom to choose to add this unborn child to the family or to abort it for the greater good of those already born. If we take away that choice, then the unborn baby may be saved but at the cost of a far greater evil to the woman and to those already born.

Is it better to allow a woman her choice, knowing she may choose to abort in some cases, or do we remove that choice and most assuredly commit evil in every single case?

Life must be protected. There is no doubt about that. As a woman, it is my duty to protect the life of my unborn child, not the government's, not some preacher's, certainly not yours. It is also my duty to protect the lives of other children I may already have, and those living children take precedence over an unformed and unborn potentiality. It is my duty as a woman to protect the people already living in my care, and I must consider so very many things.

The welfare of the developing embryo is, like the embryo's own tissues, too caught up in the mother's own existence to be considered separately. The distinction between mother and child occurs gradually. In the beginning, when there is no distinction, when the embryo is incapable of independent viability, it is and must be entirely and completely the mother's decision on how to safeguard all the lives within her care, from her own and the already-born to the unborn within her. The mother can, should, indeed, must, protect herself first, because she must be healthy and able to care for those dependent upon her. Then she must protect the already born who are in her care – whether those are older children of hers, her elderly parents or grandparents, cousins, kin, mates, mates' kin, co-workers, neighbors. She has a large group of people to consider, not just the one unborn potential of a child.

Life must be protected, and the question becomes, whose life?

The pro-life argument is not one of law or physical technicalities, but of the spirit. It is not life with which they are concerned, but the soul. Let me address this from my own Numenist perspective.

To have any integrity of the human soul at all, we must be allowed to know, and knowing, to choose our path. To remove a person's right to choose is tantamount to gainsaying the spiritual concept of free will. Free will is an important part of Numenism. Those who would prevent a woman from making a choice to bear or abort the unborn embryo may think they are stopping a terrible crime, but what they are actually doing is harming everyone - everyone connected with the woman, everyone in that woman's neighborhood, society, culture, and religion, and they are harming themselves more than all of these others. They are stifling spiritual growth, playing god in an unhealthy way, and abusing the intelligence granted us.

It is fine to be pro-life. If you can change someone's mind with love, compassionate words, and physical support, so much the better. Offer the mother all the help she needs, during her pregnancy, during the childbirth, and most importantly - after the child is born.

It is not acceptable on a spiritual level to force someone to make choices they would not make because you feel it is the right thing for them to do. Removing choice from someone removes their humanity, their adulthood, their hard-won maturity. It makes of them slaves. Slaves have no choice in what they do - it is all controlled by someone else. Spiritual slavery is as terrible as physical slavery. I, personally, think spiritual slavery is more terrible than physical slavery, for physical slavery has avenues of escape, even if that escape is death. Spiritual slavery offers no escape, for even death doesn’t guarantee freedom.

This isn't about "killing babies", it is about the freedom of the human soul. It is about being allowed to choose our destinies. It is about being allowed to have respect for our own reproductive lives, and it is about having no shame when we protect ourselves by doing what we must.

I could never ask a woman to risk her life for a pregnancy she did not want. I could never ask a woman to shoulder a lifetime responsibility she does not feel she can bear with grace. I could never force a woman to abort who desperately wanted the baby she carries. I could never presume to make a life-altering decision for anyone not myself. I didn't even have my son circumcised so he could make that decision for himself when he was old enough. How could I have the utter arrogance to decide if a woman would bear child or not?

I believe that abortion is the taking of a life, but it is not murder. There is no negative stigma on a woman choosing to preserve the emotional, physical, and mental well being of her life and the lives of those already dependent upon her. Abortion is a method of self-defense and protection for her and her world. To label a woman who has had to choose an abortion with the same name as the people who deliberately drown their children or shoot them or starve them is a disservice to the soul of society. And when we burden society's soul with too many negatives, it responds in harmful ways. Those already born become less valuable, more disposable. People who know their lives are not valued in turn place little value on other people, and violence, greed, and callousness become common.

The reality of abortion is not black or white. It is not good or evil. It is human struggle, filled with blood and grief and fear and pain and humiliation. Nobody plans to get pregnant just so they can have an abortion. Abortion is not used as a primary method of birth control, not by any sane, valued being. Birth control methods fail, and abortion is a back-up for that. Men take advantage of women via rape, and abortion is there to help protect the woman from one major consequence of the man's violent act. A pregnancy can go horribly wrong and the body needs help to be purged of the unviable flesh. A health emergency arises and the health and well being of the mother supercede those of the embryo. Only the woman can determine if she is capable of caring for the child that will come from a pregnancy, to accept the risks, and to bear the consequences afterwards.

And that brings us to what our society would consider the dark side of abortion and what I consider the bright side of it. Relief. Abortion is a safety valve for families. The choice to abort or not allows the woman and her family freedom and safety. It is a considered action that dignifies the value of human life and the human soul by considering all parts of the equation and not just the one unknown cipher. Like any act of great human consequence, there are times when abortion is the right and only thing to do, and times when it is a terrible mistake. The pregnant woman is the only one who can make that decision, and once made, we, as a society, cannot ethically and morally judge her choice, not and remain a moral and ethical society.

Who are we to second-guess her choice, a choice that is never as simple or easy as it sounds?

We have the wealth, the technology, and the ability to make every child born a wanted child, to prevent unwanted pregnancies, to safely abort dangerous or unwanted pregnancies, to provide support while any children are entirely dependent upon the mother, to make families stronger and safer.

But we don't.

As a society, we Americans devalue the mother, we force women into untenable positions to assuage the vocal demands of a small group of control freaks, we force children into untenable lives of poverty and violence, we make all of society colder, meaner, and more selfish, and we do this by preventing women from being honored; block them from making the hard choices they must make. Abortion is not easy. It is as life-altering a decision as giving birth, and there's not a woman who has had an abortion who doesn't regret the need for that decision. They may not regret the decision itself, they may rejoice that they could have that choice, but they will always regret the need that forced the decision upon them.

This isn't even addressing the primary reason for allowing women to make the choice to carry or abort the pregnancy – the spiritual growth that such decisions will bring. By abrogating the woman's right to choose, we stunt her spiritual growth. We enslave her soul and the souls of all her children and dependents. Through that, we demean society’s soul.

Perhaps there are those who want women to remain spiritually small and weak; they are themselves small-spirited.

There are those who will cry out, "But what about the father's right to choose?"

And to them I answer: The father's right to choose takes place before the act of coition. There are pregnancy preventions he can take - spermicidals, condoms, even reversible vasectomies. If he chooses not to take them, and squirts his sperm into a woman anyway, then he hands over the decision for what happens next to the woman. It is her body, her life, her family, her community, her spiritual well-being that informs her decision. She may choose to allow him a part in her decision, but it is ultimately and completely her decision, and it will remain hers until we develop something along the lines of the Bujoldian uterine replicators. When we have artificial wombs that put no woman's life at risk to carry a baby to term, that involve no woman's emotions, bodies, or families; then men can decide to take custody of the embryo, grow it in the artificial womb, and raise it.

When women can walk away from the pregnancy as easily as men can, then men can decide.

So, if men want to make that decision, to take the lifetime responsibility of growing and rearing a child, they should hustle and develop working artificial wombs as soon as they can. Until then, they need to take responsibility for their fertility, either through using condoms and a spermicide, through abstinence, through vasectomy, through the male birth control pill, through self-control. And they must always, always be aware that birth control does indeed fail, that surgical sterilization isn’t always 100%, and that, like most humans, women make mistakes, are forgetful, may have an idiosyncratic reaction to birth control, and sometimes, sometimes, in spite of all the effort to the contrary, pregnancy occurs.

Abortion is a safety valve for those instances. For men as well as women.

Abortion is never an easy choice. No matter what the media tries to make us believe, abortion is a dreadful burden, a life-altering choice that haunts the women who must choose it for the rest of their lives. If a woman is impregnated by a man - through failed birth control, through lies, through rape, through changed circumstances - she has very few options. Every one of those options has a strong potential to be detrimental to her health, her spirit, her mental well-being, her finances - and the health, well-being, and futures of those already alive and in her care.

If a woman lives where she can still choose abortion, she has to undergo a risky surgical procedure to free herself of the unwanted pregnancy - a man walks away without having to undergo any kind of surgical procedure or alteration to his body.

If, for religious or ethical reasons or, increasingly often, for lack of adequate medical care in her community, she has to carry the unwanted pregnancy to term, she risks a host of ailments, up to and including death. A man gets to walk away without any kind of damage to his body and certainly without any fear of dying for the pregnancy.

If a woman chooses to place the child for adoption, she can't do so without the father's permission - permission he can deny just to punish her - and it is a punishment to both the mother and the poor unwanted child, to have to work and spend money to feed, house, clothe, and educate that unwanted child, frequently without any support whatsoever from the father - who gets to walk away without losing a penny or a moment's sleep over the lives he's just destroyed. Even if a court of law determines he should pay child support, all he has to do is walk away.

A woman who walks away from her baby is prosecuted for child abandonment at best, and child abuse at worst.

If the couple are married when the child is conceived and born, if the man decides he no longer wants to be responsible for the child he helped bring into the world, all he has to do is nothing. He can leave all the care and work of raising the child to the woman. No one condemns him for it. No one demands he pay for the life he helped create. No one blames him if he denies the child is his. After all, short of DNA testing, there’s no proof, not like there is when a woman gives birth. Maternity is rarely in doubt.

So many men have taken the option to just walk away, it's a wonder women haven't risen up and reacted with far greater anger and made far stronger demands. It’s a wonder women even consider giving men any choice at all. That women do give most men a say in the decision says a lot about the women’s ethics, morals, and concerns.

Men make their decision to impregnate women the moment they allow their unprotected sperm to come into contact with a fertile egg. If men failed to use birth control themselves, then they are as liable for the unwanted child as the women they impregnate.

The burden of birth control is not and should not be entirely upon the woman.

Me, I'd like to see every child born be a wanted child - planned and anticipated and hoped for. That means everyone has to own up to their part in the procreation process - from erection to living child, and take responsibility for the results of their choices.

That means we need a wide variety of choices, from better birth control for both genders to better behavior from men and women to better health care. We need health care professionals who care about the health, welfare, and spiritual needs of the patient; not ones who can refuse care whenever they choose. We need artificial wombs so women can walk away from a pregnancy as easily as men do. We need better methods of adoption and fosterage. We need more humane peer pressure.

We need to allow women the freedom to choose and the access to knowledgeable and skilled physicians to help them in their choice.

And men? If you want to have a choice in the continuance of a pregnancy - get busy developing artificial wombs. When you build those wombs, then you can choose.