I am pro-choice on abortion. I was not always this way but became this way after becoming an atheist. This is because the overwhelming reason for someone being against abortion is religious. It isn't scientific or reality based. It is a religious principle forced upon others. This principle is the imago Dei or the image of God. I will now elaborate.
Most abortions get performed in the first trimester, and the fetus has fewer cells than in the tip of my finger. Many times, women will have spontaneous abortions during this time and never know they were pregnant. This is reality. Life as defined by Christians is regularly flushed and evacuated from a woman's uterus. If God cares about the unborn, he sure has a shitty way of showing it.
The unborn do not have a soul. This is because God and the supernatural do not exist. No human being is made in the image of God. Now, can this be justification for abortion? It would be pretty weak since on that basis no human has a soul and can be extinguished at will. So, there must be a better substitute, and that substitute is sentience.
Sentience is the ability to feel and have consciousness. On this basis, a dolphin requires more protection than an unborn child. I don't see any pro-lifers making a campaign against dolphin slaughter. This is because dolphins are not made in the image of God according to their theology. Since there is no proof for God's existence, these arguments are worthless. If you go with my sentience argument, you will come to a conclusion much like the one found in the Roe v. Wade SCOTUS decision. It is also why people have little to any hang ups on pulling the plug on a brain dead individual.
Drawing the line on when sentience begins and ends is problematic as well, but it is a much better standard than the imago Dei standard. You can't use theology as a standard for legal matters. Christians will howl over this, but until they prove God's existence, they can keep howling. As it stands, the Roe v. Wade ruling is the best decision I think they could have made at the time, and it could probably be tweaked in the light of new information. I just know that as an atheist that life as I define it is linked solidly to consciousness. It is also why I don't care to live in a state of diminished consciousness and why I pursue a life of enhanced consciousness.
What makes people fully human is their ability to reason and to know and to feel. In this respect, humans are like gods. If other species exhibited the same traits, they would warrant the same protections. A frozen embryo is not on this level. Now, some will go so far as to argue for infanticide which I abhor. I also recoil at partial birth abortion in the third trimester. So, where do we draw the line?
This is the age old philosophical problem of how many grains of sand does it take to make a heap. We don't know. It is a fuzzy line which is why abortion has become such a contentious issue. No one can draw the line to everyone's satisfaction. As such, it would be better to leave it to the woman and her physician than to let government decide for her.
When it comes to state funding for abortion, I am against that. It is one thing to ignore someone's religious opposition to abortion. It is another to make that person pay for something that violates their conscience. That is wrong, and it results in much of the contention we see over this issue. I will defend Planned Parenthood's mission, but I would vote to defund them in Congress every time.
This is my position on abortion. If you have contrary viewpoints, let 'er rip in the comments section.
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