Abortion is an issue that every American political candidate is asked about at one point or another. I don’t understand this, because abortion is such a minor issue in a post-9/11 world where there are so many other, more important, issues.
Often times Liberals blame Conservatives for being pro-life along with pro-death penalty which would, by definition, contradict the stance of “pro-life.” But you have to think of pro-life, not in literal terms, but in reasonable terms. Let’s look at an example. How can you be pro-life and support the death penalty? Let’s break it down: if an unborn fetus has no choice whether he will be born or not, then the mother must make a decision. Generally, except in the case of the mother’s health, incest or, arguably, rape, the mother should choose to have the baby. Because the fetus, a living organism that would become a human being, has NO say whether he can live or not, makes it murder to kill him. Now lets look at the death penalty. The person to be put to death has lived life. By choice, that person has committed crimes (usually murder) to put himself in that situation. A jury of citizens was presented evidence that proved the crimes of this person and he was seen so evil that he had been sentenced to death to prevent any other murders that would likely happen were he not dead. How are these instances the same? A fetus has NO choice whether to live or not, whereas the person sentenced to death willingly committed crimes against the law and knowing that there is a death penalty. He chose to commit the crimes that would lead him to the position of death. To me, they are two totally different things.
Moving on. When it comes to abortion there is a stalemate. Many people in this country feel that abortion should be outlawed, while many others believe that it should be the mother’s choice. To quote Dinesh D’Souza, whom I’ve quoted before, “hard-liners are fools. Because they want to outlaw ALL abortions, they refuse to settle for stopping SOME abortions; the consequence is that they end up preventing NO abortions.” (Letters to a Young Conservative p.192) This, to me, makes a lot of sense. Why prefer a stalemate over progress? One presidential candidate who stands for this (whom I disagree with on almost ALL issues) is Rudy Giuliani. Unfortunately for him, he hasn’t figured out how to say this correctly and only gives the impression that he is a Liberal pro-choice Republican, which is certainly not true. But the question is why not work hard preventing SOME abortions by encouraging adoption and what not, then push legislation to ban it when abortion is close to nil? Being hard-headed only causes a stalemate and no progress. Not to mention, if you tell people what they can and cannot do, they only want to do the opposite of what they’re told; it’s human nature.
Does this mean that I support abortion? No. Does this make me pro-choice? Absolutely not. I believe that abortion is the wrong thing for a soon-to-be-mother to do. I believe that it is immoral and we should do everything we can to prevent it, but me hard-lining against abortion gets nothing done. We should hard-line for encouraging adoption over abortion, which would make remarkable progress and make another family, that can’t have children, happy.
Some people will say, “Abortion is the number one issue for many religious people, and these people would never vote for a person who thinks that way (about abortion).” My answer: Christians who make abortion the number one issue which determines who they will vote for are idiots. If a candidate came up to me and said, “I will do everything I can to win the war on terror. I will close the border. I will have a tax reform. I will cut government programs. I will encourage Charter schools for competition. I will encourage individual health policies over universal health care. blah blah blah.” then said, “I will NOT try to make a federal ban on abortion (because it can’t be done), but rather try to reduce the amount of abortions that occur.” These hard-line Christians would be fools to overlook that!
I am a Christian. I am a Conservative. I am pro-life for progress. I guess that make me Pro-Progress.