I believe ...

I feel uncomfortable sometimes when I write about women's reproductive rights here - you know, contraception and abortion. We all know I'm pro-choice, but I'm not sure people understand why I am. I've been accused by some of being pro-choice because I myself must have had one or more abortions. That's not true - I have never had an abortion. I've always used contraception, it always worked, and pregnancy was never an issue for me.

I am pro-choice because I'm a feminist. I grew up this way. My mom took us to the doc when we were in high school to get contraception. When I was in college, I had a part-ime job at the school's health center and was turned on to books like Our Bodies, Ourselves ...



And later, I ended up being a volunteer at the local Planned Parenthood, answering contraception questions on the phones, and working in the vasectomy clinic. To me, abortion was just another aspect of women's reproductive health care. I knew there were people against it ... in the 90s, there was a lot of anti-abortion violence ... but I never knew anyone personally who seemed to care about it until I became a Catholic.

A thought experiment. Imagine you work alone in a lab. There are frozen human embryos in the fridge ...

And also there's a cage of white mice on the table ...

A fire starts and you only have time to save either the embryos or the mice, not both. Which would you save?

I would save the mice, because they would be scared and they would suffer horribly if they burned to death. The embryos have no brains, no hearts, no consciousness - they wouldn't be scared, they wouldn'tsuffer. They are not "persons" in the same way mice are.

I asked a Catholic friend about this and he said he would save the embryos. Because they were human. And he believed human life is sacred and must be preserved.

I'm pretty skeptical about this reason. Many religious people are for the death penalty, for war, for gun-toting, and for dooming social services that save lives.

And the Bible ... God doesn't seem to have a lot of respect for human life himself. How many died in the great flood, in Moses' Egypt, in Sodom and Gomorrah? Look at Job - God killed his children. Yes, he later gave him replacemts, but his original children were still dead as doornails. Even in the NT, Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead just for not sharing all their money with the community. Jeez.

While I do recognize that there are some individuals who seem to genuinely care about fetuses, I think the majority of the pro-life movement is being disingenuous. I think they basically want to control women's choices, want to impose their anachronistic views of women's "purpose" on all of our society.

I don't believe they will be successful, even given the reactionaries now on the Supreme Court. Their view is a minority view, even among the religious. Most people believe that women and girls are persons with rights. Most people believe that while fetuses may eventually become persons with rights, they are not persons in the same way women/girls are ... yet.