Soul Abortion

Politics and religion, the two subjects that should not be discussed at the dinner table. Each have their share of hot button topics, none more so than those that overlap between the two. Today I’m talking about one such topic, the morning after pill.

You may wonder why I don’t cover the broader issue of abortion. It’s because I have no clear stance on the matter. I’m pro-choice for first trimester abortions and pro-life for third trimester abortions. Any demarcation as to when exactly my stance changes is largely arbitrary, so I vaguely point to the second trimester. My feeling is that there are valid, secular reasons not to abort an unwanted fetus, but only religious reasons to oppose aborting an unwanted embryo. Plan B provides the perfect example of religion fueled opposition and is the safest for me to discuss without hesitation.

Emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs), such as Plan B, are intended to disrupt ovulation and/or fertilization. They are basically just a higher dose of standard birth control and likely don’t abort anything. Even so, the rivals of the pills claim that they could be an abortion, and any chance of this is a chance of killing another person.

When they say "person" or "baby" or "human-being," remember whatever terminology a theist uses for that thing in mamma's belly, they really mean a “soul.” In their eyes, a person begins at fertilization because a divine entity has delivered a soul to a collection of cells. I don’t buy the angelic stork hypothesis. It won’t be some immortal essence that brings conciousness to the unborn child. It will be it’s brain...and it doesn’t have one yet.

So if you are opposed to abortion and you are opposed to the morning after pill, I’m going to write off your opinions as magical thinking. If you are opposed to abortion and you support ECPs, then we can talk. My opinion remains flaky until the theoretical question of “would you have an abortion?” becomes practical...and seeing how I’m not a woman, I doubt it ever will.