Pro-choice doesn't seem very pro-choice either

I really liked both Bethany and Joe's articles regarding abortion. I too take offense to the "anti-choice" label and I completely agree that Obama's statement was unchristian and I certainly am not in agreement with it as a pro-life individual. I think that abortion is never a good option for so many reasons, not the least of which is the effects that abortion has on the individual who commits it. We are discussing abortion in my philosophy class, looking at Simone de Beauvoir, a feminist contemporary philosopher. I found her section on abortion really interesting, although I disagreed with many of her points. However, I want to briefly discuss some of the issues she raises with abortion, perhaps issues that we can discuss in a couple of weeks when we look at the topic.

One of the problems with the pro-choice vs. pro-life language is that for many women, they do not really consider abortion a choice. As de Beauvoir says in her chapter, no woman truly wants an abortion, no woman truly wants to kill her own child, it is more that she feels that there is no other option for them. That women feel that their only option is to kill their child is an overwhelming failure on the part of American society. For a fourteen year-old African American girl who grew up in poverty with constant sexual abuse and has sex through her own confusion and sense of despair and gets pregnant, abortion feels like the only choice. She feels has no choice if she does not want to see her baby grow up under the conditions that she has. Perhaps she was adopted, and he foster family represented an even worse situation for her than the poor, run-down, understaffed orphanage where she spent a few years without any parental or adult interaction. Why would she want to give her child up for adoption? Why would she want to let her child grow up in the situation that she did? Yet, she knows at fourteen that she is not in the position to do a better job raising her child. So, she gets an abortion. This is wrong, she is killing her child and she is causing emotional damage to herself that she is not even aware of yet. But, to her, she sees no choice.

I walked out of an Obama rally one day to find a group of people with a mega phone screaming at us that we were going to hell holding pictures of bloody fetuses. I was struck by the hatred with which they were trying to get out their "Christian" message. What about a woman who had had an abortion and was struggling with that decision who has to hear people screaming at her that she is going to hell and look at photos of bloody fetuses, is that really Christian? I thought to myself that perhaps the pro-life movement could put its efforts into other ways of getting its message across. Just as Bethany's post stated, we are not "Anti-choice," we want to give women a legitimate choice, but in order to do that society has to make shifts. We need to provide better education in poor communities, we need to provide support and government aide for young mothers, particularly single young mothers. Instead of standing on street corners condemning people we need to be out in the community living our pro-life values and helping those who are lost and confused. When I was younger, before it closed, I volunteered with my mother at a Christian organization that provided clothes, food, shelter, and support to young mothers who chose not to get an abortion and needed help with that decison. This was a wonderful experience for me as a young child and I think it is closer to what Jesus would have done. As a society, we need to focus more on this work, in my opinion. We also need to show compassion to those who have had an abortion and allow them to talk about it and seek forgiveness, not condemn them to hell!! Is that what Jesus would do?

The final issue that I think is important when it comes to the pro-life movement is the issue that Bethany brought up briefly and that I focus much of my final project around. Pro-life is not simply anti-abortion. It is not simply, anti-euthanasia. Pro-life means pro LIFE- all around, for the whole life of an individual. To be pro-choice and to makes statements like Barack Obama did is wrong and it is not Christian, but neither is sending our young people to fight a war that was waged on a lie, or allowing our children to grow up with no health-care, or letting minority students go to schools that are literally falling apart around them, or telling the people around us that they can't come into America in hopes of a better life. Let's be pro-life, let's change society to actually live out these values, and let's give women a reason to want to bring life into the world.