Pro-choice, pro-life, it's all about rights.

A lot of reactionary rhetoric comes out of the religious right. While that's my entry in the alliteration understatement category, I also want to use it to preface my discussion of a certain view that seems to be a common consensus for pro-lifers: that if you're not fighting tooth and nail to ban all abortions, shame all aborters and mourn every abortee, you're a sick twisted baby killer who is fit for the pits of hell for all eternity. No matter what the circumstance, every single fetus or even hint of an embryo is considered sacred. However, this view simply can't hold up morally in the real world. It's very easy to label the world black and white, good and evil when it's outside of you're viewing it from your fishbowl of like-minded and rhetoric-perpetuating social circle, but as soon as you're forced to deal with the choice yourself, it's never going to be as simple as it always seemed.

The first thing that breaks down about a pro-lifer's argument is that every life is special and deserves to live. Of course, we are life, we reproduce, and we want to do everything we can to continue to reproduce; but the fact is, that there is no universal mandate that says that we must. This is simply the elucidation of an animal urge, that has been enshrined by religion and continued by literal interpretationists. The universe is NOT pro-human. A human life has literally no meaning in the grand scheme of things, other than being a very slight physics and chemistry equation. This is not a negative thing, it just simply is. The universe is an incomprehensibly vast machine, and we are back-eddies of entropy.

This is anathema to the pro-lifer, who believes that every life is blessed by a creator with a unique soul at the very instant that the sperm meets the egg. The place that this argument breaks down is actually quite simple. Have you guessed it already?

Yep. There is no such thing as a soul.

No, really. It's a pleasant thought when you're scared of dying, which is a natural thing for humans to be, and it's comforting to imagine that you will live on in some way because you're extra neat and special. That's fine, but when you're talking about legislating something to be illegal because of a deathly fear of no-consciousness, well, get the fuck over it. Yes, it sucks that perception and memory cease to be when you die, but why let it run your life? Or, more to the point, other people's lives.

There are so many ways that the gray area of real necessities for legal abortion come up in real life. There are victims of incest and rape, there are ectopic pregnancies that if brought to term will kill both mother and fetus, there are horrible deformities that would destroy lives of families forced to deal with a child that suffered them just to die eventually anyways. There is no good and evil here; just tragedy, and doctors and nurses that do their work because it is needed. The fact is, we know that this is an objectionable part of human life. Now the big question becomes one of human rights. There is a world of difference between something that is morally objectionable to one segment of the population, and something that is illegal for all of them. One group cannot legislate the basic rights of another; reproductive freedom is a basic right for all humans. Fetuses cannot have rights, because they are only potential. Their environment and health status define their viability, not any basic inalienable right. Their parents and doctors have to be the ones to decide if this is a viable human. If we were to assign rights to a fetus, we might as well give them to yeast. It's life, it's growing, it's part of god's plan, right? Not really. Doctors aren't in this business to kill babies. They're in it to help people. Actual people, not an abstract image of a perfect child or a conglomeration of cells. If people decide to abort, it's not a crime. Give them your support, not their condemnation. Give the doctor your condolences for having to perform a difficult duty for the greater good.

Here's a hypothetical for the pro-lifers to help understand how we might feel:

Imagine in the near future, population growth becomes a real problem. Everywhere is feeling the pinch as resources and living space dwindle. A political party rises to power, and part of their platform is restricting births to 2 per couple. I vote for them because I believe this is the right thing to do to, for the greater good. They come to power, and suddenly you can no longer have any more children than the law will allow. Your reproductive rights have just been legislated by a group that you don't agree with, and there isn't a goddamn thing you can do about it.

Imagine how frenzied and up in arms you'd be? And you'd never see a trace of irony in it. It would be quite poetic, actually.