360 Degrees: Abortion

No, this isn't creepy deja vu. This is me piggybacking off of Alex's blog post, since as I started to write her a comment I realized I was pretty much writing what I needed to for this post. So...
1. Rape, incest, dancer to the mother, etc: I agree, to an extent, but for the rape/incest thing, there are ways to stop a pregnancy from ever happening AFTER the fact, and those things are not abortion.

2. The mother is unable to care for a child economically:  Because you get pregnant doesn't mean you have to keep the baby. There are 1.5 million American families that want to adopt a child. That is almost double the 820,151 abortions that were performed in the US in 2005.

3. Having a baby seriously messes up your life when you're young: In fact, not having a baby when you're young (and by this I mean having an abortion) can seriously mess up your life later on. Not only do many of the girls who make this decision (when they really don't have the wisdom or life skills to do so) have psychological problems and regret later on, but it can actually affect your health. Having an abortion leads to a greater chance (2x the risk) of an ectopic pregnancy, or when the pregnancy occurs outside of the uterus. You also have an increased chance of miscarrying later in life or developing PID (pelvic inflammatory disease).

4. Abortion decreases crime: I don't have any statistics to add to this, I just think it's very iffy logic. It seems like a lot of maybes, because there is not a direct link between abortions and the decrease in crime, it is merely coincidental that they happened roughly 20 years apart. Also, criminals aren't all 20 years old. There are many who are older, and many who are younger.

To wrap up, I'd like to talk about a few things that Alex didn't address.

5. The definition of life: Don't get me started on Roe v. Wade (basically, the Supreme Court said that they couldn't prove something, then contradicted their own standards by ruling like they had definitively proved against it), but if we use the murky definitions of death to determine the even murkier definitions of the beginning of life we can see that most abortions would be illegal. If you measure it by heartbeat, you can see a fetal heartbeat by the 18th day in the womb. If you measure the end of life by brain activity, then by 10-43 days (when the fetal brain waves are shown) many abortions would be illegal.

6. It's part of the mother's body: Alex sort of addresses this, but it doesn't make sense to me. The fetus, though dependent on the mother for the first trimester, is a completely different life form. It is a new human, not some growth "like the mother's appendix." It has separate DNA, therefore it scientifically is NOT just some other part of the mother's body. It is a new person simply residing inside of her.

7. It's not like it does anything to the baby: Actually, studies have shown that the fetus CAN feel pain, or at least discomfort. At 8 weeks, if you stick a fetus in the palm with a needle, his mouth opens and he moves his hand away. I don't know what else he would be reacting to... They have also shown through use of movement detection and fetal heart rate monitoring that both are affected when the fetus is "in pain."

I can give you all of these reasons, but this is a moral decision for most people. I believe that it is wrong probably because I value all life, no matter how small ("A person's a person, no matter how small." -Dr. Seuss). I believe abortion has started to become far too blase in our culture, and it is being used by some as a method of contraception. This is NOT what it is, and probably most (if not all) of pro-choice activists would agree with me on that.

But every time I am confronted with this issue, I think of a what if situation. What if my mother had aborted me? I wasn't a planned baby, my mother was on birth control at the time. But she loves me all the same as any other parent loves their child, and I know that. But those other children were denied this wonderful thing, and that bothers me that they weren't given the same chance as I was.