My Belated Blog For Choice Day Post

I did not realize that yesterday was Blog For Choice Day. Here’s my two cents about why I am pro-choice.

I am for individual liberty and opposed to government intrusion. Decisions about whether to bring a pregnancy to term are among the most intimate and private matters I can imagine, and I would not advocate allowing the state to poke its leprous nose into them. Here’s how I interpret the anti-choice position in a nutshell: advocacy of having prosecutors, policemen, judges and politicians decide how much risk a woman should be willing to assume because the state owns her womb. It’s not about the rights of blastocysts so much as it is about authoritarian meddling with women’s bodies and lives. Could you look a woman you loved in the eye and say that you valued the abstract rights of a blob of protoplasm over her individual sovereignty? I could not.

And the issue is more complex than anti-choicers would frame it. No pregnancy is risk free. Women still die from complications in pregnancy, and there is still risk of injury. Who am I, or any prosecutor or judge, to dictate how much of this risk a woman will be required to assume? That is a private matter best left to the woman in consultation with her doctor or others she may choose to consult.

What about those women who abort as a form of irresponsible birth control? It can’t be helped. It is not worth the increased government power and intrusiveness to set up a system to ensnare women whose motives we might not admire.

If we let the state into the womb, it won’t be long before it takes up residence in every cell of our bodies. Perhaps that is what the anti-choicers have in mind.