Abortion should not be a great moral question

Over at Unfogged Lizardbreath writes for Blog for Choice Day about her own experiences with abortion:

I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve had an abortion; I don’t know how clear it was that it wasn’t a particularly sympathetic abortion. In spring 1995, I’d just started having sex with a new boyfriend. We were using condoms until I could get on the pill, and either one of us screwed something up, or there was a leak, or something happened, and I got pregnant. I had an abortion as early as I was able to schedule it, didn’t find it a particularly upsetting experience (being pregnant was upsetting, both for the obvious practical reasons, and because the hormonal effects of early pregnancy make me very emotionally volatile. One of the odder things about the abortion, and about a later miscarriage, was suddenly recovering control of my emotional state over a period of less than a day.) and haven’t regretted it since then. […]

That’s what abortions shold be like: a guitl free, practical decision devoid of endless moral agonising. But of course, that’s exactly what the never ending battle over abortion makes impossible; when even the pro-choice side thinks abortions should be “safe, legal and rare” no wonder many American women find abortion traumatic.

It doesn’t have to be. The only people who really believe abortion is murder are nutcases like Eric Rudolphs who are willing to kill to stop it. Everybody else, pro-choice or pro-life, has already agreed, either out loud or tacitly, that abortion isn’t murder. All other arguments against abortion come down to “ickyness” and are hence aesthetic rather than ethical objections.

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abortion, pro-choice, feminism