The A-Word...

Name me one 'value' of Bush's that Kerry doesn't have, and that I should consider 'keeping'.

War-mongering? - no thanks.

Homophobia disguised as 'celebrating a tradition'? - Hitler had a solution to homphobia too. I'm sure he gave all sorts of 'pros' on the other side. Nah, I'll stick with the idea that everyone has a fundamental right to life and liberty.

Then they say it. I stop in my tracks. The A-Word: Abortion.

I must admit I'm stumped.

Now, let me begin by saying that I am firmly committed to the idea that when a baby is inside a woman, it's part of her body, and so the decision about what to do with it, is hers. Anyone who doesn't have a vagina needs to bow out of such conversations revolving around 'policy'.

Still, it begs the question as to whether or not abortion is 'right', doesn't it? I mean, liberals have 'morals' too, contrary to what the red states seem to think.

But, a priori, abortion seems to be 'murder', doesn't it? That thought doesn't sit well with me.

So let's think about it for a minute. Or maybe longer.

Don't even bother pulling out your bible. It says nothing about abortion. Yes, it says, do not kill. It also contains more than enough passages to support those who feel they can run amuck and kill whoever they need to in the name of 'freedom', or worse yet, in the name of God.

So all we get from the bible is, 'don't kill'. We get that from common sense.

The question is, 'what are we killing'?

Let's start with the extremes. We are killing something that is technically speaking, 'alive'. But don't get too carried away yet. Plants are alive. So are bacteria. When's the last time you saw a referendum on stopping the bacteria-cide that's going on.

Ok, we have that extreme. Now we must ask ourselves, is a fetus in a womb equal to a person?

What makes a 'living thing' the equivalent of a person?

I am not comfortable when people assert things like, 'we were all embryos at one point, what if you had killed us when we were embryos?' Not cool. Why is the moment of conception any more fundamental in the progression of life? It seems to me to be an arbitrary division of spacetime, onto which we project this sense of 'potentiality' that I don't know has a priveldged place among all the other 'potential' happenings we could encounter.

Every moment in the universe is a moment of creation. For all the death that's going on around us, there is that much more creation taking place. All at different levels of course.

When you were 4 cells big, what made you more important than say a rat with a hundred billion cells?

God? Says who? I'm telling you a time is coming when we will 'create' things that think which will have nothing to do with the old swimmers and eggs. What will you say then? They aren't alive. Why not?

So, I can't solve this conundrum. Abortion, though, is something that I think we are not paying enough attention to. Buried in our ideas about it, are our conceptions of what makes a living thing important.

So while I support a woman's decision to choose, I can't go so far as to say I think whatever she does is 'right'. It's too complicated of an issue.

But on the other hand, all those people who sit around on the street waving signs with dead babies, who have no problem eating meat or supporting science experiments on mice, what's going on there?

The problem is, life is a very fragile thing. And if we're not careful, we're likely to kill it, whether we mean to or not.

I guess, for the time being anyways, abortion falls under the category of self-defense, for me. I believe in my stupidly idealogical brain, that violence is ALWAYS wrong. No matter what the reason. But, I'm tempted to make exceptions for extreme situations, like times of self defense. I think the world would be best if no one ever used violence, even to defend themselves, but I'm not sure the world could function in such an idealogical sort of way. So I won't get on your case if you HAD to kill someone to save your own life, or a friend, or whoever.

Likewise, I think abortion is probably ultimately a 'bad' thing, since it's causing violence to life. And violence is always bad. But in the scheme of things, I don't know that aborting a fetus is any worse than killing a mouse or something like that (I'm not talking about late stages of pregnancy, which is a more difficult scenario). I know, sounds like I have no morals, right? Actually, it's not that I don't value human life, I just think we devalue the life of other creatures. So I'm tempted to balance that out by equating 'creatures' with equal biological properties.

In any event, I'm not a woman, nor will I ever be. So I will never pretend it's a decision I could or could not make. But that doesn't stop me from trying to get at whether or not we all have a real appreciation of life in general, and what it means to have such and such an appreciation of life.

So I'm Pro Choice all the way. But the loss of any life is something that should profoundly shake us inside. And if you are Pro-Life, you sure as hell better be fighting for every last creature, big and small. Because otherwise you aren't really pro-life. You are really Pro-Us. And the universe doesn't have time for such narcissistic games.