All too often, in our arguments on abortion, we give absolute power to the rights of the mother.
As a child conceived out of wedlock, I am thankful that my rights as a human, to exist, were not molested by parents that would think their own convenience more important than doing the right thing. I can accept abortion in cases of rape or absolute, immanent, and otherwise unavoidable death to the mother. Those are unfortunate exceptions that must be taken accounted for in our imperfect world. But these are also very rare and should not be used as a stop gap to justify abortion as a norm or as an issue of a woman’s health.
Every day that I breath, or see the sun rise and set, I can be thankful that I was conceived to a mother and father who took the high road. Not the road that would have doomed to me to being an “unperson.” I do not need religion as justification, my existence itself, at least to me, is justification.
I could have been born to parents who wanted to get a promotion more than see me born. Or parents who wanted their own selfish secondary desires fulfilled, over the most basic of mine. My parents knew (when they had sex) that I was a possibility. Something that, when I began to grow, they did not destroy.
I do not need religion to justify my hatred of flippant and on-demand abortions. I am my own justification of this. I can admit there are a few, almost statistically none existent examples of justified abortion, rape being the most common of this blue moon.
However, there is my right as a person to exist, which overshadows their rights to an easier life. They chose to have sex (hence where the rape caveat comes in), therefore they must live with whatever happens because of it.
I will also take offense, as a human, at the thought that a fetus is not the same as a human.
Until someone gives birth to a shoe, a tree, or a printer there is no justification that it is not the same as human.
From zygote to fully formed and viable child, it still has the same end point and killing it is murder. Just like how, in life, there is justifiable murder there is also justifiable abortion. But innocence in this murder must be justified in the same understanding of extenuating circumstances that the murder of a born human enjoys.
I believe that all humans adults should be able to love whomever they want. I believe that all human adults should be allowed have consenting sex with whomever they want. I also believe that with this wide freedom comes an understanding and acceptance of that action.
The right of the unborn that comes from that action must be taken into consideration. The right of a human that cannot speak for itself. The right of the child whose own parents may wish to terminate it. Their right to live, their right to love, and their rights as a human, are the same their parents already enjoy. Their right as an equal human.
* Joseph A. Mance was born in central Florida in 1988 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Purdue University in the class of 2010 and is a former member of the US Special Operations Command as a psychological operations specialist. He spent time in Afghanistan as a private military contractor in 2010-11. A nationalist in foreign affairs and a libertarian in domestic affairs, Joseph is currently unmarried with no children living in Paris, Kentucky on an 11 acre estate.
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