Abortion

I wonder if this is allowed in today's America, but I'm pro-life and pro-choice.  I don't know, is that possible?  Food for thought, it seems, but I don't have any problems hoping every baby conceived is born, but I also support having a choice to abort that some women insist--some rabidly--is a constitutional right.  I wouldn't want any laws whatsoever to compel a woman who chooses to abort her child (and note, it is a child, semantics notwithstanding) to stop.

Why all this?  I'd just read this incredible blog post by someone named DBB, a self-described atheist, libertarian-leaning lawyer.  He recounts undergoing what must have been a thoroughly agonizing experience in deciding--for his semi-comatose, exsanguinated wife--to abort a baby that was literally killing her.  After signing his consent to the procedure that would save his wife and kill his child, he recounts getting very angry at pro-lifers, a reaction no doubt as understandable but perhaps as illogical as enduring the pain of waiting for news of his wife's subsequent surgery in what had appeared to be an otherwise normal pregnancy.

I don't know if I'd come to the same conclusions were I (God forbid) in the same situation, but thinking about politicians and legislative interference would be the last thing on my mind in that waiting room.  What is interesting is the involvement in the abortion "debate" he suddenly finds himself in: making a decision, albeit by proxy, to have an abortion, something he'd always flippantly told himself wasn't a problem for him personally, you know, being a man and all.  Ah, the gray fog of reality!

An excerpt:

Mainly, then, I start to think about the abortion debate. About pro-lifers, in particular. I think about all those meddling politicians that would want to interject themselves into everything that just happened to me, interject themselves between me, my wife, and her doctors. And then I had a strong, visceral reaction. I wanted the mutherfuckers to die. I wanted to rip off their heads and tear out their hearts, because how DARE they play politics with my wife's life? The baby was fine until the end. I wondered if that would have meant they'd force us to let my wife bleed until almost death before they'd let us abort, because well, if she's not near death, then it is just a 'health' exception, and we can't have that! Fuck them. Fuck them all. They can fucking die, as far as I'm concerned. This was what went through my mind as I sat there, waiting to see if, after my baby died, my wife had died as well. I still feel that visceral reaction when I think about it, though not quite as strong - right then and there, if someone pro-life walked in and started talking about it to me, I very well might have physically attacked them. And I'm about as non-violent as one gets.

Some points: well obviously, practically, there was no politics played with his wife's life because he was perfectly free to sign that piece of paper authorizing an abortion.  I can understand it being a visceral reaction and all, but the salient fact of the matter is that, in this particular situation, an abortion was not an illegal procedure.  Further, I doubt an abortion to save a mother's life would ever have been declared illegal.  Even if this weren't the case, I'd still support keeping the choice a woman can make after medical advice, a free and legal one.

However, I don't agree with abortion on demand for (say) 15-year-olds who can't drive a car but can terminate a pregnancy without parental consent.  I don't like, but wouldn't make illegal, using abortion as a method for birth control.  Like I said, it'd be wonderful if every child conceived was born.  And importantly, born into a stable family.  I just don't like the whole culture of death that abortion on demand conjures.

DBB (which I just figured out stands for Disgusted Beyond Belief) further writes that he didn't feel as much of a loss re the aborted baby as he would have one which had been born and died after birth.  Fine, but at what point would you mourn?  What if the baby had been born, stayed alive for two minutes and then died?  What then?  By that logic, does that suddenly place the dead baby in a completely different, perhaps "mournable" class?  I don't know, it's not a logical situation, by any means.  It's not easy.