You cannot be pro life and pro choice at the same time
By Tom Quiner
“First of all, I am both pro-life and I’m for a woman’s right to choose with proper education by her physician.”
This is the opening statement of a Quiner’s Diner reader questioning Conservative’s commitment to the poor. She posed good questions which I will address in the days to come. However, her opening remark deserves a quick rebuke.
The first half of her statement contradicts the second.
An assertion of right to life acknowledges that human dignity is intrinsic and not conditional. However, by invoking the term “right to choose” she introduces an expansive host of excuses used by human abortion advocates to deny their fellow human beings a right to their life.
Human persons in the womb are killed by the minute because they are unwanted, inconvenient, or flawed.
Do we kill one year olds because they are unwanted, inconvenient, or flawed? Not yet, and hopefully never. And yet the pre born human person one week in the womb is the moral equivalent to the one week post born human person.
You can not embrace a right to life at the same time you embrace a right to choose.
Absolutely right on! Thank you, Tom for correcting misguided thinking!
You can not be pro life & pro choice. That is like saying, it is saying, I am against murder, but if you want to murder, that is alright. That is your choice to murder or not. That sounds ridiculous.
I am pro-choice and pro-life at the same time. It’s just that I believe the choice is made when the woman CHOOSES to have sex. It is why I believe in exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is in jeopardy (self-defense). I also believe that when the man chooses to have sex, he has chosen to support the child should one be born from that union.
I find it interesting that women then will say “You can’t tell me what I can and can’t do with my own body”. I realize that. But when you make the decision to have sex, instead of remaining chaste or abstaining until marriage, you have the possibility of creating a new life. And that new life has rights, or at least it should. The Declaration claims “we are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights, among these are LIFE…” I am not telling women what they can and can’t do with THEIR bodies. I am telling them they should not be able to end the life of their unborn child.
I have a friend who is a Lutheran pastor and he says that he opposes abortion but is pro-choice.
How does he explain that one?
He tries to give the answer of “It’s a complicated issue” or “I don’t believe we have the right to tell women what they can do with their own bodies”. I left the Methodist Church because when I was in college, I was writing a pro-life opinion piece for my school newspaper, and before turning it in, I wanted a pastoral view. He told me he was pro-choice and in fact had driven a girl to get an abortion so her parents would not find out. My response was “And you call yourself a man of God?” which as you can imagine did not go over very well. I left the Methodist Church that day. I joined a non-denominational evangelical church and when I moved, I joined the Baptist church, and am a Baptist to this day. I had another Methodist pastor tell me once that he believed the Methodist Church would soon break up, not over abortion, but over the issue of gay marriage. He figured it was only a matter of time before the UMC developed a tolerant view of gay marriage and started performing them.
Thanks for the follow up. To you and me, it is not complicated. Human life begins at the instant of conception. Each person is made in God’s image. God knew us before we were born. In other words, our dignity precedes our birth. And even more, we believe personhood isn’t contingent on whether we’re convenient or flawless or wanted. Nothing complicated about it.