Pro-Choice & Anti-Choice Voices
By Michele Gomez
I’ve been an abortion provider for 17 years and a believer in a person’s right to choose ever since I can remember. It seems so obvious to me that no one should be able to tell another person what to do with their own body, or make decisions about what is best for their life.
Even so, I recognize that it is a complicated topic. I can understand why people might have strong feelings about terminating a pregnancy – even the language we use to describe it implies we are ending something that otherwise wouldn’t end (which of course we don’t know for sure, since somewhere around one third of pregnancies end in miscarriage anyway). And while I still feel that those people who don’t believe in abortion just shouldn’t have one themselves, and should let other people make their own decisions, I’ve become really interested in what ethicists and religious leaders (decidely not the same thing) have to say about it all.
I’m particularly interested in this topic because the majority of the objection to abortion in the United States seems to be from people who say their religion forbids abortion. But is that even the case? In the book Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions, by the ethicist and theologen Daniel C. Maguire, the author makes the case that the position of most religions is nowhere near so monolithic and decided.
This article in the Atlantic makes a similar argument, and provides some really interesting history on how the pro-choice and anti-choice movements have both used religious arguments:
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