Choice & Life

Today is "Blog for Choice" day, and Matt Yglesias (half-heartedly) answers the call. But his post, which is only a few lines long, is exactly the wrong thing I want to see coming out of the pro-choice movement. Here it is:

I'm afraid I don't have a very interesting answer to the question of why I'm
pro-choice, but suffice it to say that since fetuses lack the cognitive functions that are constitutive of moral personhood, it's not wrong to kill them. One can introduce some additional complications into the equation but it's Basically that simple. That legal Abortion encourages premarital sex is feature, not a bug.

In the immortal words of John Cusack from High Fidelity, that's some cold-ass shit!

Geez, I hope no anti-abortion people are reading this blog. I can imagine the tagline on National Review:

Leading liberal blogger says it's ok to kill fetuses in order to promote premarital sex!

Which, if I read this post correctly, is pretty much what Matt said.

The pro-choice movement has absolutely zero chance of convincing the nation to support this kind of position, even if we all believed it ourselves, which is obviously not the case. This is the kind of cavalier attitude that allows the anti-abortion people to keep claiming they "support a culture of life."

I would not stand in public and let myself be associated with someone who shrugged his shoulders at the difficult moral issue of abortion, dismissed the issue with an esoteric philisophical point, and then claimed that making premarital sex easy is a reason to allow abortion.

I'm pro-choice for two reasons. The first is that I believe the world is better if the only children born into it are loved and wanted by their parents. The second is because I believe the government has no right to decide who has a child and who doesn't.

But facilitation of premarital sex is not a reason to support abortion rights. Premarital sex is fun, and can be emotionally fulfilling, and nearly everyone does it, including myself. But it definitely takes a back seat to issues of life and death, rights and freedom, and the choice of whether to bring a new human being into this world. And if we who support the pro-choice movement can't put our priorities straight, we risk becoming exactly the nihilists conservatives say we are.

Support choice. But support it for the right reasons.