Blogging for Choice

Given today's anniversary in America I think it is a good idea to post about my views on abortion.

I am pro-choice with next to no reservations. I think that if a woman wishes to have an abortion it is fine if she is doing it for either health, wealth, or purely selfish reasons. To me it does not matter because I view abortion as a third or fourth chance to decide not to have a child rather than the ending of a life. This does not mean that I think that pregnancy should be viewed without value or that no wrong has been done to a person who has been forced to get an abortion or given a miscarriage. But it emphatically is not murder or even a homicide.

If a potential mother is so selfish that she would have an abortion just because it is a little inconvenience as it is alleged by anti-abortion people I say it is good that the mother has an abortion. Imagine a child being raised by such a theoretically selfish person or the genes that may be passed on. No, far better for society and children to make abortion easy to get. Not that I believe that more than a few percent (at most) of women seeking abortions are such sociopaths or psychopaths.

I do not know if any of the women I know socially has had an abortion. No one has told me about their experience, but I am convinced of the usefulness of abortion to improve society and the lives of the women who have them by the statistical studies of the legalization of abortion.

I think it might be desirable to have some regulation of abortion to reduce or prevent the problems associated with unplanned genetic editing. For example the selective abortion of girls (as is reported as happening in China and India) or the more theoretical choice to abort fetuses on the basis of having or not have specific genetic traits. Not that I think it would be a bad idea to abort fetuses with defects, necessarily, but it should be considered carefully on an individual and societal level. And forbidding or outlawing might not be the best response either. Perhaps counterbalancing incentives would be a better response. But the first thing to do in this regard is to gather information about reasons given and the actual traits of aborted fetuses, the knowledge of the father, etc... Discover if there are any problems first and legislate carefully (only if required) afterwards.