Once Opposed Abortion

The news of the day brought me to this confession. I once opposed abortion. I thought it was m****r. I even believed this for a few years after I abandoned the Catholic faith of my childhood. But this was before I thought carefully about the difference between a full human life, a personal life, a biographical life, full of desires, thoughts, judgments, and wisdom, and a merely biological life, with cells dividing and growing and moving around, but with no mind present. In my youthful ignorance I thought that all human life was equally valuable. And as I result I said various offensive things to people, exposing my ignorance to the world.

And now I've grown up and learned better about these distinctions. About how mere biological life and potential doesn't make us valuable, but only actual mental capacities do, capacities which develop gradually, and even just before birth are still only incipient, taking off rapidly after birth. About how many fertilized eggs fail to implant let alone come to term, so that birth is hardly a uniquely natural or divinely-ordained outcome of conception. About how most "pro-life" people don't really believe that the fertilized egg is itself terribly valuable, as they would certainly not rescue a tray of 100 frozen embryos instead of a child from a burning fertility clinic--no they consider those less valuable because their potential is not "natural"--i.e., not in the bodies of women who are "supposed" to get pregnant, and whose pregnancies are not their own to choose or control, but under the yoke of someone's religion or society or state power. About how potential is not actuality, any more than an acorn is an oak tree. And about how restrictions on abortion have oppressed women--with actual, full human lives--for centuries, and will now do so again.

In becoming wiser about this, I have perhaps also gained a certain amount of humility, knowing how wrong I once was about this topic while feeling so certain that I was right. That doesn't keep me from making judgments about this and many other topics, including some which don't affect me personally as a straight, cis male, but it does remind me to seek to become better informed from those more affected as I make my judgments. And it makes me both angry and sad to think of those who have not yet understood what I have come to understood, and who have perhaps through sheer naivete, and perhaps by choice, continue to accept simplistic, distinction-erasing, and oppressive mantras about "the value of human life" or "God's g*ft of life," which in practice results in de-valuing the lives of many actual adults who do not wish to become parents.

I am ashamed of my past beliefs and expressions, and can only hope that it can to some degree help me to patiently explain to others who still hold such views why they are wrong, and why they should change. To those of you who knew better all along, I am glad to have caught up with you, and to be accepted as one who respects the value of a fully developed human life.

Comments

Anonymous

by Anonymous on Jun 24, 2022 at 9:56 PM

What an ignoramus. Where do you think a "fully developed human life" come from?

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Anonymous

by Anonymous on Jun 25, 2022 at 5:42 AM

Scientifically speaking, a fetus is not alive. Period. It's only when people mix up religion and science that they want to change the definition of life.

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Anonymous

by Anonymous on Jun 25, 2022 at 8:05 AM

Keep the lame-assed political shit out of this site. Go to "The View" or Dr.Phil with your" dickishness".

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Anonymous

by Anonymous on Jun 25, 2022 at 8:08 AM

Keep your personal political view to yourself. Or go to "Dr. Phil" or "The View". Nobody wants to see that crap on here.

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