Pro-choice and not pro-abortion

By Anders Loven-Holt

Abortion is not murder.

The chance that you agree with that statement is roughly one in two and depends heavily on your sociographic disposition.

However, for the purposes of this column, let's assume that you don't agree. If you're inclined to passionately defend your beliefs on the spot, there are a number of arguments you could invoke to counter my statement.

The most convincing reasoning usually involves some combination of theology and cellular biology, though the more common arguments are much more simple and doomed to rhetorical inflexibility by the dubious assumptions upon which they are built.

Consequently, the abortion debate is painfully stagnant -- there are effectively two positions one can take regarding the issue, and both are founded in metaphysical assertions that have a nasty tendency to be empirically non-evident. Undoubtedly, our debate would digress into a mishmash of dogma and pseudo-scientific conjecture before collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity.

So let's skip the metaphysics and go straight to the root of the disagreement -- because before you tell me why I should believe that abortion is murder, you must convince me that you honestly believe it first.

I say "murder" rather than "wrong" for two reasons. First, many anti-abortion arguments allege that abortion is indeed murder, or, more colloquially, "like killing babies."

Second, the act of terminating a fetus is explicit -- there are not the shades of gray or contextual variances that complicate many ethical and political issues. Sound logic does not support the position that the fetus is "sort of" human, and terminating it is "somewhat" wrong -- a position that too many people effectively settle upon.

The fetus is either equivalent to a human -- and therefore terminating it would constitute murder -- or it is not, in which case terminating it would not be seriously wrong.

So why don't I think that you believe that abortion is murder? Because you're debating it with me, rather than fleeing in terror and disgust as you would if I were a murderous dictator or anybody else who has few qualms about massacring humans on a large scale.

Because, rather than moving elsewhere, you're paying taxes to a government that, by your account, has permitted a slaughter exponentially worse than the Holocaust. Because, despite ideological differences, you happily work, study and party with people who -- based on your assertion that the fetus is human -- might just as soon kill you as have an abortion.

Because you're probably too calm right now to honestly believe that you're sharing a building, possibly even a room, with women who have already willfully ended an innocent human life.

I suspect that in actuality you fall into the "sort of wrong" category described above, as few people exhibit behavior that would indicate true commitment to the "murder" assertion.

You might subsequently counter that while not actually murder, abortion is indeed "sort of" wrong because human life is somehow infinitely special and it would be a shame to waste any blob of cells blessed with such potential.

However, a cursory glance at human behavior reveals that we are more than willing to shorten and risk our own lives and those of others in pursuit of temporal pleasures, meaning that we place a very finite limit on the value or "specialness" of human life every day.

Furthermore, if you (or I, or anybody) were truly concerned simply with maximizing the amount of human life that exists because of its invaluable qualities, the time and resources spent protesting abortion could much more effectively save lives if directed toward Africa in the form of humanitarian aid.

So while I should make it clear that I am not pro-abortion, I am pro-choice. To morally oppose abortion in the casual way that many of us do requires careless reasoning at best. Abortion is not good and it is certainly not optimal, but it is also not murder, and we should perhaps consider other outlets for our benevolent impulses before rallying against it.

Anders Loven-Holt is The Santa Clara sports copy editor.