I see this over and over again. Someone pro-life accuses someone pro-choice of "liking abortions" or being "pro-abortion" or thinking "abortion is great". Nearly every time a comment like that is almost immediately me with an extremely offended reply from the pro-choice person, repeatedly saying how much they do NOT like abortion. Why? It is obvious to me that the pro-choice people on this forum do not like abortion, in fact they nearly dislike it as much as the pro-life people on these forums, so why do they fight so hard against those who are pro-life? They obviously see something wrong with abortion, somewhere deep down they relize that it is not right and no matter how they defend it they still have these feelings and every once in a while these feelings will bubble to the surface. I have to wonder do they even relize it? Are they aware?
So pro-choice people out there what is it? Why do get so offended if someone says you are "pro-abortion" what is it about abortion that doesnt sit right with you? And why do you continue you to defend it when you obviously have bad feelings towards it?
I'm one of your pro-choice people who would never say I "like" abortion. I will say that I dislike unwanted pregnancy, for every girl or woman, no matter the reason it is unwanted. I love my fellow women and girls, not in a homosexual way, but in a shared humanity way. I have studied them via anthropology, European and American history, and Asian history. I know the histories of laws against their independence, autonomy, freedom, and equality, I know cases of persecution of them for various reasons at varied times in history and across the world, I have read their writings, contemplated their art works, admired their known cases of heroism. I have taught and tutored them, and I have been friends with them, with women and girls from all over the world as well as here. They are persons, and I wish for them what I wish for all born people: I wish them to have the lives they want as long as they do not harm anyone outside their own body boundaries. For genuine persons, the most wonderful things to have are awareness, active mind, and liberty of person, including the liberty to control one's own body so that it behaves in accord with one's active mind and conscience.
I do not understand blastocysts, embryos, or fetuses to be capable of those things, for they can continue living only if implanted into the tissue of a woman's body, and even if implanted, they can continue living only if that woman's body continues living up to their viability, so I do not consider them to have lives of their own up to that point. I do not consider them to be persons until they are born and, in being born, transformed for living in biological independence as persons.
I consider human sexual intercourse to have as its primary purpose the mutual consensual sharing of intimate affection between two people. To me, its biological purpose, which is the reproduction of the species, is not primary, because the importance of human beings does not come from their being biological, but rather from their great capacity for awareness, active mind, and liberty, and, therefore, for higher mental and spiritual life, which I do not consider to be dependent on physico-chemical existence or biological life.
I therefore support a girl's or woman's right to choose whether or not to get pregnant and whether or not to stay pregnant and give birth, because pregnancy and childbirth most often impinge negatively on their bodies and it is their right to make decisions about whether or not they want to sacrifice the more positive bodily normality of being unpregnant and not giving birth in order to develop and give birth to new people.
In that context, abortion, like the morning after pill and all forms of safe contraception, is useful to girls and women because it allows them to experience mutual consensual sharing of intimate affection with people of the opposite sex without being forced to serve the merely biological purpose of reproduction of the species and it allows them to avoid the consequences of coerced, non-mutual sexual intercouse. It would be better if unwanted pregnancy simply never occurred - that would obviate the need for either abortion or the morning after pill to serve that liberty for female persons. This might be possible with better contraception and sex education. But it would be ideal if we did not even need contraception.
So I am no more pro-abortion than I am pro-morning after pill and pro-contraception and pro-sex education. I am simply anti-unwanted pregnancy, in the interests of the liberty of girls and women as persons.
There is, however, a limit on my support of abortion in the interests of the liberty of girls and women. Abortions in later pregnancy are dangerous for women and viable fetuses in most cases could become new people if simply removed from women's bodies, so I think it makes sense to limit such abortions to cases of greater danger to the woman's life/health or cases of seriously deformed/disabled fetuses, or those rare cases where impregnated rape victims are held captive until later pregnancy and then want to end the pregnancies.
So I do not think of myself as pro-abortion, because ideally unwanted pregnancies should never occur or continue, and it is only because they do that abortion exists to protect the liberty, autonomy, and bodily control of girls and women as persons.
