Consider this a response to Raging Red’s ‘Why Are You Pro-Choice?’ post.

I’m pro-life because I am absolutely certain that, fifteen minutes before birth, an unborn baby is a baby, and, therefore, a human life. On the other hand, I am almost absolutely certain that a fertilized egg is not a human life yet, and since, in that case, the only person concerned is the mother, I’m pro-choice.

The problem is, I can divide that nine month period into lots of small chunks, and I am absolutely incapable of telling you when that living blob of flesh that is not-a-human-life becomes a human life. I’m mostly certain that we don’t have a human life within the first week. I’m reasonably certain that we don’t have human life three weeks into the pregnancy. Three weeks before birth, probably a human life. A handful of days before, almost certainly a human life.

But where’s the cut-off? I can’t say. It’s a philosophical and medical question that I’m not sure we can answer definitively; we have a hard enough time defining what life is at all.

So, how do I then decide what I believe in terms of whether we should allow abortions? I look at the costs of being wrong.

It gets to the point where I cannot bring myself to say “That is not a child” because the cost of being wrong is so much higher than the cost of being wrong if I say “That is a child”. [Added after the fact: This is not to say that I don't hold anyone's rights to control their own property (including their bodies) in high regard; just that I consider the death of an innocent to be a higher concern.]

Of course, that only works in the ideal case. We can confuse the question even more by adding other variables. For example, if the woman’s physical or mental health is in serious jeopardy or if the pregnancy is the result of rape, the cost of being wrong by not allowing the abortion if the woman chooses to pursue it rises to the point where it makes the costs much closer to even. If I consider both the costs and my level of certainty, I can accept (though very warily) the idea that we should allow abortions in the earliest stages of a pregnancy, though my acceptance of that lowers sharply beyond the first trimester.

In the end, I really just wish we could get past the name-calling nonsense and stop throwing so much vitriol around. The pro-life folks aren’t (for the most part) simply trying to impose their will on women; they honestly believe this is a child’s life we’re dealing with, and they quite rightly want to protect that child. On the other hand, The Witches is fiction. The pro-choice folks (again, for the most part) aren’t anti-children. They aren’t revelling in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of babies. They believe these aren’t children, and simply want to protect the rights of a woman to control her own body. I wish people would understand that and try to reach a compromise that disappoints everyone minimally (I realize that no compromise will make everyone happy).