Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

For A More Effective Abortion Debate

For+A+More+Effective+Abortion+Debate

CHATTER-square2I remember a time when one of my friends asked me why Christians are against abortion. She thought that there was some random doctrine (maybe the Bible said something about it) that prohibited abortion, rather than any sensible attachment to reason. Unfortunately, the abortion debate is plagued with such misunderstandings. The conflicting sides mostly talk past one another and think that people of the other side are irrational.

People who are pro-life think of people who are pro-choice as irresponsible and unreflective. People who are pro-choice think of people who are pro-life as dogmatic and anti-feminist. My goal for this article is to outline some key misunderstandings of both sides and suggest some points for a more meaningful discourse.

Firstly, Christians are against abortion because they believe that all humans were created in the image of God and are therefore inherently valuable. They choose to define life as beginning at conception because at that point, the fetus’s genetic makeup has been determined as 23 chromosomes from the father meet 23 chromosomes from the mother.

Instantly, we should recognize that value for human life is not a distinctly religious value, but rather a secular value as well. The difference really lies in how we define life.

People who are pro-choice define life as beginning when the fetus can survive on his or her own. However, I do feel that people who are pro-choice tend to gloss over this point that is so critical to people who are pro-life.

There is also a perception that the pro-life view is insensitive to women’s rights. Because childbirth hinders women, not men, it is thought that to prohibit women from having an abortion constitutes unequal opportunities for women and men.

But once again, the validity of this argument depends on our definition of life. If life begins at conception, then abortion constitutes unequal rights for that fetus in comparison to persons post-birth. It is for this reason that some of the first feminists were pro-life.

Feminists for Life, an organization that sees themselves as the continuation of founders of the feminist movement such as Susan B. Anthony, says, “We believe in a woman’s right to control her own body and she deserves this right no matter where she lives, even if she’s still living inside her mother’s womb.”

People who are pro-life also have unreasonable expectations regarding sexual realities. Even if we think that sex is for procreation, not recreation, we can’t enforce that private belief on others. For that reason, people who are pro-life should support contraceptive use and education, as that is how we can avoid unwanted pregnancies in the first place. For people who are pro-life, this number becomes 94,000 persons dead mostly because of complications in or lack of contraception.

Abortion is a very emotional subject and it is therefore an issue on which people will take some extreme stances. What I want to communicate in this article is that people aren’t unreasonable. People, for the most part, hold the same values and the difference lie in how exactly we seek to protect those values. To prevent misunderstandings of the other, it’s important for people who are pro-choice and pro-life to talk to one another and understand why people of the opposite view hold that view.

IMG_64281Ayan Mandal is a freshman in the College. Technolosophy appears every other Wednesday at thehoya.com.

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