Clarifying

Just to clarify what I was trying to get across in that last post:

1. The post below is not meant to be a definitive statement on my own views on abortion. My own views are not nearly so black and white as they might appear. As I said, though, I don't want to get into a general argument about the issue.
   
2. The post below is in no way an attack on anyone who is pro-choice or has had an abortion. In fact, I did my best to use terminology that the pro-choice side of the argument would find acceptable and to minimize any of the emotional aspect of the conversation.
   
   I know a few people who have had abortions, and they both had extremely different experiences and feelings about it afterward. I don't feel any different about them, knowing that they've had abortions, than I did before I found out.
   
3. The point of the entire thing, boiled down, is this: if you stake out a certain plot of moral ground, I think you should stick pretty consistently to that ground. That is, if abortion (in a general sense) is morally acceptable, then there is no need to respond as if it were tragic when someone has more than one of the procedures or even when a person has just one abortion. If abortion is okay, then admitting to it isn't that bad of a thing--it's not brave or strong, it's just, as Andy noted, a case of too much information.
   
4. That I believe that if you can't reconcile the two points--the moral righteousness of an act and the feeling of tragedy in response--it's worth re-visiting your beliefs.
   

Over the last five or six years, I've changed my opinion on same sex marriage, the death penalty, and the necessity of a less isolationist American foreign policy. I have been looking at abortion for the last year trying to define what I truly believe, why I believe it, and how it fits into what I hope is a pretty consistent moral world view. I'm not saying that my view of morality is definitive, just that I try to apply it consistently and with reason.

I'm not afraid to have my world view challenged and, often, what I write here is simply doing what I can to challenge my own views.

Posted by zombyboy at July 28, 2004 09:47 AM | TrackBack