I find the subject of abortion a difficult issue to face. I feel that human lifer begins at conception. There is an irresistible logic to that. I am also male and will never be pregnant and look at my responsibility for not causing an unwanted pregnancy one that is totally my own. I have only one choice in the matter and that is not to cause a pregnancy anybody would terminate. That means scrupulous care in having sex with and only with someone I am willing to or have live partnered.
I look at life as the result of an animation of inorganic molecules and the feeling of the sanctity of life as a kind or metaphysical joke the universe has played on us. I value my life because the value of my life is what keeps me and all life alive. It is an innate reaction to having evolved as is all of my other feelings of compassion and love. I am an animal that does and must feel and identify with the feelings and plight of others. As I love so do I want that chance for the unborn fetus.
Life is also a paradox and basically accidental in form. We are split 50 50 male and female. That was a matter of how we evolved. I am male only by chance and the same for any female. Only the, shall we say, fortunate 50% can have children who are born with the extra life giving double X. So only by chance do those 50% have to face the issue here. By chance then, the other 50% should have no say in the issue. Once a woman is pregnant they have missed their opportunity at choice. They will not have the tremendous genetic burden of nourishing an extra life and all the tremendous weight to life and health that a child will bring. A man can father a million children and never even know or be involved in the lives of a single one of them. I see this, therefore, as ineluctably and strictly a woman's issue and purely by chance since we evolved accidentally as dual sex organisms.
Now I think that the natural feeling of the sanctity of life that every organism that evolves to consciousness will feel has been externalized and projected out as coming from God. One can't really tell therefore, since we evolved in the image of the universe, who is in whose image. What we do know, though, is that for those who think God has made hard and fast rules abortion is an evil and that in doing so they create the evil of absolutism in the process. A rape victim or incest victim cannot abort nor can we execute murderers because all life is sacred. There is something equally irrational about the notion that a mother should love the child of a rape. There is about that also something that repels just as abortion does. There is something repellent about forcing a girl of ten to mother a child of her father. There are problems with the yuck factor when you apply absolutes.
It seems to me therefore that the answer to the problem of abortion does not lie in feeling. The notion of the sanctity of life is just a biological feeling. It is not an absolute. Where one absolute conflicts with another, the ten year old say, with her father's fetus, something has to give. It seems to me that you have to rise to the level of reason.
A fetus is a potential human in our feelings and also in fact. It is also an amoeba or hydra on the evolutionary level or maybe even a fish. What it does not have is self consciousness or the awareness of the sancrosanctity of it's own life. It has only the evolutionary drive to survive. It will not acquire a feeling of self till way after birth. This is in part why we don't usually have funerals for the fetus. People understand intuitively that what is lost was potential and not actual person hood. What people morn is the loss of that potential.
So the abortion debate, to me, devolves to a question of when is potential person hood, the wonderful experience of being alive we wish genetically for all, to be valued above the real person hood of the mother. Do we force women and girls who are accidentally female, who can't volitionally control ovulation, who are also genetically driven to have sex with guys who are similarly driven, to suffer the tremendous responsibility of giving birth to all conception. We know that poverty, ignorance, stupidity and irresponsibility will increase the likelihood of this occurring. We know also that the hideous world of poverty and want we see around us is of our own making. We do know that, don't we?
I see abortion, therefore as an unfortunate necessity of intelligent life on earth as long as fertility is not voluntary. We cannot enslave ourselves to the stupidity of absolute rules any more than we can deny our compassionate moral center. We have to compromise somewhere using our intelligence. The present regulations rational secular judges have reached are just such an intelligent balance, in my opinion. I am free to have sex with a willing partner who wants to be a parent, and women are free to make their won decisions
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