Walking for life
Today was the first time since I joined YFC that I missed out on the annual Walk For Life in San Francisco. While I lay in bed, reflecting on what I would be missing, I had a bit of time to think.
I’ve always had a…liberal I guess view on my religion. I don’t agree with everything my faith stands for, but I follow it faithfully because over all, Christianity is my belief, and I believe in what it stands for despite my objections to certain things.
Being the day of the Walk For Life, my feelings felt conflicted. I’d never really admitted this but I’ve always felt conflicted over going to the walk since I’ve never really made a decision over what I believed.
I’m not going to say I’m some expert here on the topic of abortion, I only know what I have heard and what I can assume. Feel free to tell me how I might be mistaken or if my assumptions are right, but take this blog with a pinch of salt because I know I’m not an expert, I’m just a man who believes in ideals.
As I’ve grown, I’ve learned what the value of life is. From the bacteria to the massive animals which live below the waves, all life is sacrate. That belief doesn’t just come from my catholic beliefs, but more from my love of heroes, after all, no life is worth nothing. A life is a life, and no one ever deserves a fate less than another, epically human life. It’s value cannot be measured in coin, and to see a life lost is…no wait, should be tragic, but death is, and always will be, apart of life.
Death is dark, it’s sad, it’s tragic, it’s one of the biggest disruptions to our daily lives, and abortion is a death. I don’t see how anyone can argue against that, who really honestly knows when something goes from no living to living? In biology life is defined by a bunch of characteristics, but among them are that it has to be made out of cells, it has to be able to reproduce and grow, it can respond to stimuli, and can adapt. In my eyes, an embryo can do all these things, it’s made out of cells, it can definately reproduce and grow, stimulate it and it will respond, and change a condition and it will adapt, so why can’t we say it is alive? Just because we don’t know if it has a consciousness? Well I don’t think a skin cells or some bacteria will be writing a sonnet anytime soon, but we still see them and say that they are life right?
But then again I miss the bigger picture. Abortion isn’t just about if an embryo is alive or not. It’s about how it affects people. It’s about what it means to someone. The idealist in me says it’s murder. It’s depriving someone of a life before they ever even get to breath the air. If I had my life in someone else’s hands, as sad as I might get, I’d rather live a sad life than not live at all, and I’d pray to get a chance to make mine a happy one.
But then I know the other side too. People often use rape as a reason to allow abortion, or the argument that a girl just might not be ready to become a parent, or even that as a guy, I wouldn’t understand and don’t get a say in a girls choice. Powerful arguments, ones with big truths in them.
Yes, i am a man, I don’t know what it means to be a woman, but that doesn’t remove me from having an opinion. Saying a man doesn’t have a say in an abortion is like saying that an actor doesn’t have a day in a character they portray. Ok not the best metaphor I’ll admit, but it’s true, guys have a stake in this too, even if we don’t have to carry the child or give birth, and unless you want to have laws for men and women exclusively created and passed by men and women, men will have a say.
They say that certain people just aren’t cut out to be parents, or they’re just not ready. Besides the obvious question of, well why’d they have sex in the first place, you have to admit that this isn’t something you can just do over or “fix”. Someone told me that no one is really ever ready to be a parent, because no one goes into it realizing just what taking responsibility for another life is like. Could that be a reason to get an abortion? Maybe, but when your playing with lives no decision is perfect. You might be ruining a life with a baby, but when you have a baby, it really stops being about you and your life, and becomes about taking care of this new life, and not screwing it up.
Rape is a horrible thing, and I cannot even begin to imagine what it would be like to be the child of one. It would be easy to say that a child is a child, but to have a girl violated and then pay for it by raising the child of the person who raped you? I couldn’t endorse that, but nor can I endorse killing.
So where does that leave me? At an impass I guess. Same place I was before I wrote this. On both sides you have downsides to abortion. A girl who isn’t ready to be a mom has a baby, and you might just screw up two lives instead of saving one, but have her have an abortion and you could be damning us all the same. The truth is no one can say for sure what the right thing to do is. You pick a side, and something is gonna slip through, because this is an issue where there just isn’t any room to be in the middle.
I really wish I could say that exceptions could be made, that made it could be taken on a case by case basis, that some kind of compromise could be found, but I can’t find one. The truth is I’ve chosen to be pro life. I don’t want someone to be deprived of life, but I know how complicated this issue is.
Ya know, during the walk, a lot of people I know look forward to seeing the pro choice protestors. Some of them like looking at them shouting or frowning at us. Maybe it’s a sense of making a stand for something, or maybe it’s the rush of maybe getting into an argument with one. For me, before it might have been a fun thought to get tested in my beliefs, but now I can’t really see them as anything more than a person like me, taking a side in this confusing issue. I just hope that even if we are on different sides of the street, we can still sympathize with one another.