(Hi! Sorry for the unintended hiatus…no drama involved this time, I’ve just been annoyingly swamped with stuff, leaving me little to no time for personal writing.  I will be back with two movie-related blogs this week, but in the interim, I’m posting this, which I wrote the other day after the entire Komen/Planned Parenthood debacle caused this unending debate to rear its ugly, polarizing head one more time.)

Here’s my thing:  I hate abortion.  I hate that it exists.  I think it’s cruel, I think it’s sad, and that every potential life ended before it begins represents another example of our global society having failed just a little bit more.

With that said, I am, and always shall be, pro-choice, because a woman has the right to choose whether or not she wants or can handle the responsibility for bringing life into the world.  That she had sex, for whatever reason, should not cause her to bear the burdens and experience the joys of childbirth and/or motherhood if she doesn’t choose to. This is especially true since she bears it, physically and perhaps even emotionally, in far greater proportion than the father of that child.  Sexual responsibility should never be discouraged, but no woman should face a life-altering experience for showing questionable sexual judgment; that’s simply not commiserate with being a member of a fair, balanced, and just society.

What personally gets to me is that on many areas of the anti-abortion side we have very hardcore conservatives fighting against the kind of social welfare plans that are at least trying to solve many of the problems that in some cases cause abortions, because they find it easier and more direct to outlaw them.  I’d rather see us all strive for a world where abortions aren’t necessary, as hard as it would be, rather than a world where abortions are outlawed but with all the problems that still cause them prevalent and everlasting.

And yet, it also annoys me when people who are ostensibly on my side argue and debate about what qualifies as a life and what doesn’t.  If it is conceived, whether it be by technicality a life or not, it will forever after have held that potential to be a life.  Trying to argue otherwise dehumanizes the argument, the lost potential, and arguer him- or herself; it changes the nature of the discussion, as well as causes the other side to assume that we don’t care.  Too many of us do, and too well.  Everything else, in a world where once we’re born we’re all essentially reduced to statistics, is little more than a pointless exercise in biological semantics.

I am pro choice, who if it were my choice to make would always choose life, but I’ll never be pro-life, because that would take from me the right to choose life at all.