Thursday, January 5, 2012

Pro-Life and Pro-Choice

Pro-Life and Pro-Choice
Perhaps the most evenly pandered issue by both ends of the opinion spectrum is abortion. Ideologues in both the pro-Life and pro-Choice camps insist their viewpoints cannot be compromised. Life begins at conception and abortion is murder say many pro-Lifers. Some pro-Choice advocates insist that a woman must have total, unfettered control over her own reproduction and that fetuses are little more than parasitic tumors that should be accorded no consideration and no rights. Such extreme positions leave little room for consensus solutions.

Panderbear is both pro-Life and pro-Choice. He thinks abortions should be safe, legal, and rare. Concerted efforts to reduce the number of abortions including more and better sex education and counseling (in and out of school), increased and subsidized access to contraception, and promotion of adoption and other alternatives to abortion should be a national priority.

It is self-evident that a zygote is not a fully-realized human being, but it is a potential human being. Appropriate mixtures of the basic elements carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, iron, and a few others are potential human beings. Unfertilized ova and sperm together are potential human beings. In biological terms there exists a continuous spectrum of states between inanimate, animate, and human being.

Panderbear thinks this fact suggests the rights accorded a potential human being should receive greater priority the further along the path of development it has progressed. An embryo should be given greater consideration than a zygote. A fetus should receive greater consideration than an embryo. A fetus that would be viable ex utero should be afforded rights essentially co-equal with the woman carrying it. Most pro-Lifers tacitly accept this notion of progressive attribution by not having funerals following early-term miscarriages.

Purists on either extreme will, of course, find progressive attribution of rights unacceptable. However, Panderbear thinks it a rational compromise in a long-standing and unnecessarily divisive debate. Sadly, lack of consensus has resulted in more abortions than would otherwise have been the case. Pro-Life and Pro-Choice is a better choice for life.

submit to reddit Share on Tumblr

1 comment:

  1. No one should be forced to donate their body in order to sustain the life of another human being.