The Least of These

The following was,in part, eloquently written on a message board by Voice of Reason.

Despite the efforts of lots of people (mostly on the "pro-choice" side) to
complicated it, abortion is a very, very simple issue. The only thing that
matters is whether the fetus is a person -- whether it has a right to life. If
it does, it doesn't matter whether the mother wants to make a "choice"; you
don't get to choose to kill another person. It doesn't matter that carrying a
pregnancy to term is inconvenient and expensive; you don't get to kill your
children because they're inconvenient and expensive. The sole exception might be
when a significant risk is posed to the mother's life, but this is so rare it
can safely be ignored for now.

The "pro-choicers" try to moderate their position in an effort to appear
more reasonable. They describe abortion as an agonizing, gut-wrenching decision,
not to be entered into lightly. They say that abortion should be "safe, legal,
and rare." They think this makes them look more reasonable. It does not. It
makes them look less logical, less rational. Because the only reason abortion
should be legal is if the fetus is not a person and doesn't have a right to
life. There's no halfway: a given entity either has a right to life or it
doesn't. Abortion is either the moral equivalent of murder... or the moral
equivalent of a haircut, of the pruning of cells which do not have any rights to
claim as their own. The pro-choicers deny that abortion is the moral equivalent
of murder, so the only alternative (for them) is the latter. Nobody talks about
the decision to get a haircut as agonizing and gut-wrenching, nobody says
haircuts should be rare. By claiming that abortion is not like a haircut, the
pro-choicers concede that the fetus does have a right to life.

But if it doesn't, there's no reason not to laugh about an abortion any
more than there's a reason not to laugh about a haircut.

Me personally, I do not believe we have enough information to decide
whether the fetus is, in fact, a person. We don't know enough about personhood,
how it arises, when it begins, to say for sure. But given that the infringement
of the right to live is such a terrible, horrible infraction (murder remains the
most heinous of crimes), I believe that we owe it to the fetus and to ourselves
to err on the side of caution and give the benefit of the doubt. I believe
abortion should not be permitted until and unless it can be proven, certainly by
clear and convincing evidence and perhaps beyond a resonable doubt, that the
fetus is not a person.

Well put.