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.
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.
posted by Russell Summay at 03:46
8 Comments:
Hey Rusty... Does givig birth constitute being a mother? I only ask because if a woman doesn't want to be a mother, she can relinquish her parental rights and give the child up for adoption - no moral or legal responsibilities to the child. Just from my perspective, it's not always an issue about wanting to be a mother or not, but whether they want to carry a child for 9 months and give birth.
Then again, does just having a child in the womb make a woman a mother? (not a "mommy" but a mother of a child?) Or is a woman not a mother until after the child is born? And does that child have to be born alive? I know lots of women who have miscarried and still regard themselves as mothers of their babies.
All that said, I guess a lot of this not only depends on your definition of what a "child" is, but on the definition of "mother." For me, the argument of "she should have a choice because she doesn't want to be a mother" is a little weak.
Hope school is treating you well - glad you're back to blogging :)
Mm, great to see you blogging again. All I really want to make a comment on is the rather psychotic, as you say, notion about the South Carolina issue.
I think, that as it would obviously affect many people who are not Christians and those who are liberal Christians, it is stupid and un-Christ-like for the Christians there to try and do this.
Jesus never forced himself on people, never forced people to think the way he thought or do/don't do things the way he and the Bible teaches. it was something that affected people personally that made them have the desire to live as he lived. It doesn't give a very good opinion of Christianity to the people we are trying to reach when we are trying to force stuff like this onto them. We should just concern ourselves with living in love and compassion, and then people will come to see that maybe there's something deeper about us and way we live...
Besides, all it takes is a little patience, and then before you know it the new millenium'll be here and we'll all be living in eternity with God and sin will be completely bare minimal.
Or something.
Just felt like expressing/spewing something-or-other.
We're missing you, Russ!
Hey, Rusticus, good to see you posting again.
Now, first off, I'm not mad at you at all about your decision. Secondly, this is a lot of interesting subject matter for my mind to digest. So please give me a moment or so to gather my thoughts...
... Well, I do agree that it is not the government's decision to legislate whether or not a pregnant woman should have an abortion. But then, the law of making abortion illegal might make alot of people back-out on the decision of abortion or not get in that situation in the first place. But also, like Jocelyn said, laws would not stop people from having or trying to have abortions. But, I think, it is important to consider the reason for why the woman wants an abortion.
For instance, if the woman was made pregnant from a rape, then to me it would make some sense for the woman to request an abortion, for it may be too painful for her and/or her child, to live life not having a father and being a child of a rape. But then, like LeAnne said, she could just give the child up for adoption, but again, it would make some sense for the woman to abort the fetus so that the child wouldnt have to go through the experience of being an orphan. I'm not sure if I worded that in the right way, but I hope you see what I'm getting at. Though I do think it is a sin and is wrong for someone to abort a child. When you think about it in perspective with the Bible, then abortion fits into the category of "murder".
And then there is the case of the woman getting pregnant and asking for an abortion, simply for the sake of convenience. To me, that request is just plain stupid and wrong. If she didnt want to have a child then she shouldn't have had sex in the first place! A child is always the result of sex, and she should've gotten married if she wanted to have sex! These situations are the majority of abortions, so it makes sense here that abortions be made illegal.
In conclusion and all in all, I would have to say that I'm with Jocelyn and LeAnn on this topic. I am against how most Christians, or just people for that matter, condemn other people just because they're not Christian or because they don't life a Christian lifestyle, or they have a different opinion on something. Stuff like that bugs the heck out of me. I agree with Jocelyn how its important, that we as followers of Jesus, should start showing love to people that they will become interested in Jesus and will come to accept Him and not abort their child.
Well, thats all I have to say about this right now. Sorry if I wasnt making much sense at some points, but I hope this comment is at least somewhat interesting to you.
Miss you Rusty!
Um...I'm extremely biased on this because of what happened with my mom and the baby last year. That is why I haven't commented yet.
I'm going to make this short. Just because it's short doesn't mean I haven't thought it through. I can give all my reasons and beliefs behind it, but that would take a very long time, so unless there is some demand for it, I'm not going to.
I believe that it is absolutely the government's responsibility to make a legislation against abortion. I mean, would you ever say that it's not the government's job to legislate against murder? If a woman doesn't want to be a mother, fine. She shouldn't have to be, but when she has a living person inside of her, as part of the human race she is bound by responsibility to do her part to keep it alive. Once the baby is born, she doesn't have to keep it, but while it is inside of her, she has no right to kill it off.
Example: A child is born to a mother who thought she wanted it. When the baby is 3 weeks old the mom decides that she doesn't feel like being a mother anymore. No one should be able to force her, right? So she smothers the baby to death while he's sleeping. Is this right or wrong?
Just because someone doesn't want to be a mother does not mean that she can choose to end a life.
yeah...and i agree that the government shouldn't legislate people's morality for them. it's not about that. in no way do i think that by passing a law abortion would end, just like people still get murdered. and i do have a problem with the protests and christians just being like "oh, you're such a bad person..." that doesn't solve anything. we do need to have a true outreach and everything. it's a difficult issue and it's hard to know how to deal with it, but abortion is murder, and murder should not be legal.
wow rusty....that's a lot to think about and when i think about both positions, i come to the conclusion that it's a subjective subject.
I don't think I would call it subjective... Take Jana's example - if a woman gives birth to a baby, and then leaves it in a trash can on her way home from the hospital, she's a murderer. But if the same woman had an abortion before the baby was born, it's legal. Ok, this is a really bizzare example, but what ifa woman is on her way to get a late-term (3rd trimester) abortion and is in a car accident. She's unconscious, and delivers a premature but "healthy" baby... does she have the "right" to kill it? If she wasn't in the car accident, the baby would be dead. Does she have to foot the medical bills? Babies are able to survive out of the womb at earlier and earlier ages now...
And there are other reasons women have abortions than not wanting to be a mother... they don't want to be a mother to a Down's Syndrome or defective child... so kill it. They don't want the financial burden. Abortion is not birth control. I don't see the legislation as much in giving the mother a "choice" as it is protecting the child. We have laws against murder, and laws that protect endangered birds, and laws about wearing seat belts... Lots of people say i don't want the government telling me what to... I want there to be laws against murder and rape and child pornography and burglary and kidnapping. Sure, I think some laws are stupid - but most aren't. No, I don't think you can legislate morality, per se... but we already do with many of the laws we have. Most child molesters and predators don't think they are doing anything wrong - they love the kids. So why do we have laws against what, within their morality, seems right and acceptable to them? Aren't we interfering with their morality by saying sex with a child is wrong?? Why can't we say killing a child is wrong?
I think some of what Rusty is getting at is that it is not the government's decision to legislate the gray area...? I agree that we should hate abortion, just as we should hate capital punishment, and all forms of war and violence.
The problem people have is it their 'right' to have a baby?
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