Pro-life Vs. Pro-choice
I am pro-choice but I believe the issue has been confused by an argument over what life is. Most people involved in the debate would never give a second thought to the definition of life if it were not for abortion. Throw out questions such as, is a virus alive? Would proto-celled material be a live? Could a computer or robot be alive? Usually (in my experience) responses will be from ‘what difference does it make’ to simply ‘no idea’. Sometimes a person has given it more thought, but I find it to be a rare occurrence.
The main complaint I have over the debate is it muddies the water. Abortion is the symptom of an underlying problem in society. If we prevented undesired pregnancies in the first place, the issue of abortion would be mute (it would still occur probably but at an insignificant rate for most people). If both parties would work more on prevention, spend as much money on prevention, I believe the problem would already be solved.
I personally can accept that at some time, before birth the fetus should be considered alive. However, not at the moment of conception. Near 90% of all fertilized eggs fail to develop to term. Usually this goes totally unnoticed as the egg fails to attach to the uterine lining. Second most often the egg is not symmetrical and fails to develop into a viable fetus. The symmetry of an unfertilized egg is the most important part to a child coming to term, not merely being fertilized. Also, in a purely natural regard (a step away from as God intended), many more children would die before birth. One reason for such high childbirth rates earlier in our nations history was because 1 in 4 would die before the age of 5 (another would be in farming communities where children were a source of labor). Clearly the death of a fetus is not so far outside the norm as to be greatly impacted by abortion rates.
I would lend a lot more credence to pro-life arguments, if they focused on some period of time where the fetus should be protected from abortion (outside of special circumstances such as the mothers death), then having the most outspoken members of the prolife groups suggesting that birth control and morning after pills are also forms of abortion. This ties into my beliefs on stem cell research, if permitted I highly doubt they would ever abort intentionally to get stem cells. It would be far easier to grow them in petri dishes. It could even be possible to select eggs that would never have the potential for creating a child to produce the stem cells. To me that is no more alive than flakes of my skin. Flakes of skin have a chance at creating life, albeit not without the aid of science and technology. Yet the same would hold true to numerous children being born today, they could not do so without the aid of science. And again, we could select only eggs that have less chance of producing a child, than random genetic information taken from my hair by cloning.
