Pro-Choice

I have come to the desicion that I am Pro-Choice...

Now before anyone who is reading this goes ape on me (or simply starts shaking their head saying, "Oh Lord, Rusty, what classes have you been taking?") let me explain what I mean by saying this, at it will take some time because a lot of factors have lead me to believe this.

Tonight I went to an SWA 'event', which is apparently different than an SWA 'meeting', different story, different time, at this event I watched, with a group of fellow social work major students, a film titled "When Abortion Was Illegal" (I am 73% that is the correct name).
At any rate the film was about women who had had abortions during the period between when abortion was illegalized and when the law was passed re-legallizing it in the US.
The stories these women told were pretty much the same: they were pregnant, they did not want to be pregnant, they could not recieve medical abortions becuase it was illegal (and the doctors who wanted to help could not or would not out of fear of being imprisoned or loosing their medical licenses or both). They all tried to have do-it-yourself abortions, some succeeded others did not, all of the women ended up having an abortion and surviving to tell the horrors of the tale. None of them learned that it was not that they shouldn't have an abortion and thus follow the law of the times only they ceased to seek out abortion as an option out of fear of the pain they endured.
(Gasps for air)

Now for me it's really simple... STOP HAVING SEX ASSHOLE!!!

Pardon my language, but i needed to get that out of my system.
I have been holding that comment in since... the first time I had ever heard it suggested that abortion should be legallized to prevent homemade abortion deaths.
However, I cannot say that to anyone but people who know me and who know that I am not talking to them.
If I were to say that to anyone else it would go against my nature to say it anyway but lovingly (that's not cheesy, it's just true).

So as I was sitting in this meeting tonight and the group was discussing dealing with abortion, pro-life/choice, etc. in the career path of a social worker, but as a social worker you should show complete lack of bias toward one position or the next.

A lot of the subjects that came up during the event were pretty interesting, one in particular was one of the three guys, in at the event of 9 plus one [female] advisor brought up the subject that people who are pro-life tend to use that name in an effort to make those that are pro-choice seem as if they are actually pro-death. Which I guess being pro-life for my entire life up until about thirty minutes ago helps me to understand what he means. As a pro-lifer, in general, we have the tendancy to look at the pro-choicers and see them as people who relish in killing [unborn] infants.
But if you really set back and look at the whole picture the problem had miles of gray area and is not even close to being black and white.

Let me try to rationalize from an social worker's view point first, try is the key word:
Women should be allowed the liberty of being able to choose for themselves whether or not the want to have a child, if it is their body and they are the ultimate deciders of how they are going to act then the birth or abortion of their unborn child is ultimately up to them.
This is a perplexing dilema, as you can clearly see. The choice should ultimately be the mother's. But them you could venture to argue if it is ethical to allow the mother the liberty of aborting her unborn child if you are, by aborting the fetus, killing an innocent life. Then you could get into the whole arguement of when a child is actually considered living, which I really don't want to do.

Now let me go off on a tangent here for a second, i will tie it in... hopefully.

For those of you who don't know, a guy I know named Josh is a pretty smart dude, but he claims that he 'used to be smart'. I don't know him really well but a friend of mine knows him and he visited one summer in Bosnia, since then i've tried to keep up reading his blogs (which you can get to at "http://www.rmfo-blogs.com/josh").
One specific blog he wrote addressed an issue of a group of highly conservative christians wanting to take over South Carolina and secede from the US inevitably creating their own christian nation.
The very thought of the idea sound perfectly psychotic to me but don't take my word for it you can read for yourself at "http://christianexodus.org". In his blog about the issue he said, and I quote, "I don’t ever see it being anything significant, but I’m worried about something. The minority in South Carolina. The Muslims (I know they’re there somewhere), the liberal Christians, the folks who just don’t care about religion. Can Christians justify a position in which they force their morality upon those people? Is it “Christian” to legislate everyone into our morality? I understand the position that these people think their ultimately doing good for the non-Christian population because legislating what they believe to be how God would have us to live, and that is the best way of living. However, is forcing that onto a unwilling population justifiable under a Christian ethic of love? Is coersion into a Christian morality justifiable?".

Now to tie this all in...

Why I am Pro-Choice:
I think, even as a follower and lover of Jesus Christ, and as a lover of life, that a woman should be entitled to the liberty of choosing whether or not she wants to be a mother. That does not necessarily mean I agree with her carrying out that desire, but I do think she should be allowed to decide for herself. I dont think that it would be true love to force someone to obey a set code of conduct, after all Don Miller (on the subject of the tree of knowledge of good and evil) said, "You cannot have true obedience without and equal opportunity of disobedience."

So there you have it, I would love it, absolutely adore it if I could get some feed back on to this post.