A while back, This Is True contained a story about two men who’d somehow obtained a bullet-resistant vest. In an attempt to demonstrate how well the vest could protect someone, one of the idiots donned the vest and allowed his friend to stab him. For various reasons (it’s not the kind of attack the vest is designed to stop, they’d used the vest more than once for this sort of demonstration, etc.), the knife penetrated the vest and the wearer died. His friend was arrested on charges of murder. (As I recall, both of the idiots had a not insignificant amount of alcohol in their systems, though I could be misremembering that, and it hardly has an effect on the story anyway.)

Given the opportunity to say what he wanted, I’m sure that the vest wearer would’ve chosen not to have actually died from a wound inflicted by the knife, and that the stabber would’ve chosen not to kill his friend or to face charges of murder. However, they knew (or should have known) that these risks existed when they chose to take the course of action that they did.

God granted humans a lot of leeway in choosing the paths that we take in this life. In the United States and countries with a similar amount of freedom, we’re even given a lot of freedom to choose to do things without a lot of fear about being punished for our actions by the government. (Granted, we still have to fear too much, but it’s much, much better than it could be.) Neither the founders of our governments nor God intended that freedom to indicate that we’d never have to face the consequences of our actions.

I realize it isn’t true of all (or even most) women who get abortions, but I get the very strong feeling that a large number of abortions are given to women who simply view them as “after-the-fact contraceptives,” something to be taken nearly as lightly as The Pill or a condom (which, due to the fact that it protects against a large number of things potentially more devestating to one’s life than a pregnancy, really shouldn’t be taken lightly at all, if one chooses to engage in sex outside of a monogamous, preferably married, relationship). I wish that people could discuss it rationally and listen to both sides. People on the pro-life side are quick to call pro-choicers “murderers,” and the pro-choice people are quick to accuse pro-lifers of trying to tell a woman what she is or isn’t allowed to do with her body.

Abortion is, in my opinion, a very bad thing. Even if two people can’t agree on exactly when a baby should be considered something more than just a parasitic lump of cells imposing itself on a woman’s body, they should be able to agree that the exact cutoff is open to a lot of debate. Since the importance of one’s right to life is much greater than the importance of one’s right to choose, I prefer to err on the side of caution and think of the fetus as a “baby” VERY early (no later than, say, two weeks after conception, and preferably even from the moment of conception).

That said, I don’t necessarily think abortion should be outlawed. As I’ve said before, I don’t think it’s the government’s job to legislate morality, and without a clearcut way of defining “this is when the baby is to be considered alive,” it’s not easy to write a law that appropriately balances the woman’s control over her body with the baby’s right to live. However, I think that, as a society, it behooves us to attach a stigma to the use of abortions as a contraceptive. When the woman’s health is in danger (mental or physical), or if she’s the victim of rape, that’s a completely different story, but when the pregnancy is the result of actions that the woman chose, society should frown on the elimination of a viable human being simply because the woman want to choose to avoid the consequences of her actions. As with the two men in the story at the beginning of this post, she has made a choice. Society wouldn’t be forcing her to be pregnant, it would be pushing her to face the consequences of the choice she made.

According to this page, Former Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey once said: “President Clinton says he wants abortion to be safe, legal and rare, but he’s helped make it safe, legal and everywhere.” The government’s job is to ensure the first two — I think that society is doing a great disservice to itself if it expects the government to regulate the third. We need to make our fellow citizens realize that freedom implies responsibility. It requires responsibility. There are those who will tell you that we have no right to frown on those who shirk responsibilities but wish to flaunt their freedoms*. I agree. We don’t have the right. We have the duty.

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*AGAIN, I’m not saying this is the case with all women getting abortions. Even discounting victims of rape and those who choose abortion because there’s an extreme risk to their health, I KNOW some women agonize over the decision, and that they feel it’s the right thing not to bring a child into the world in their current situation. I think they should’ve considered that before risking it with the having sex decision, but my problem is really with those women who seem to think that the ability to have an abortion excuses whatever sexual actions they choose to take (and I have known a couple of these…)
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