Pro-Choice

Abortion is not a subject that I spend much time thinking about. I know where I stand on the subject on both a public policy front (it should be legal with as few impediments as possible) and a personal front (I think it is morally wrong unless there is significant danger to the mother) and, lets face it, I am certainly not having enough (any) sex for it to be a concern. The one opinion I have about abortion which I tend to share is the frustration I feel about the public debate about abortion. We all know the two sides of the debate are never going to agree and yet everyone throws so much time, money, and effort into this abyss. I wonder what we could accomplish if we took all those resources and focused them on something we can fix, like children living in poverty, or the number of people living without adequate health care, anything but abortion.

Like I said, it is not something I think about much because I know where I stand and I really feel it is an issue best left between God, the mother, and the father. Then today I saw this post on Ragnell’s Written World (which, by the way, is a superlative comics blog wherein Ragnell takes on a lot of women’s issues in comics and the age old question of which Green Lantern has the nicest butt (Soranik Natu)) which put into words how I feel about many things the religious right would like to have legislated, but particularly abortion. Ragnell’s point is that by being pro-choice she is, in effect, in favor of a person being responsible for their own decisions. If abortion is outlawed then it is easy for a woman to shrug her shoulders and say, “Well, I have to have the baby.” She has no choice and therefore has the opportunity to foist off responsibility for the consequences of getting pregnant on society. Of course she still has to deal with the consequences, but by removing her choice to have an abortion, you move her from being an adult making adult decisions to a victim of circumstance. Go read the write up from Ragnell. She explains it far better than I and while you’re there check out the rest of her blog. While I regularly just about wet myself with the offerings from Campbell, Church, and Sims, Ragnell’s writing often forces me to think about issues in a much larger context and she is worthy of your attention.