A woman praying
Abortion is not a black-and-white issue, no matter how some folks want to make it one. Despite being viewed as one of the most polarizing issues in America, most of us sit somewhere in the messy middle of the abortion debate, with our personal moral convictions and what we want our laws to be not necessarily aligning perfectly.
People have big feelings about abortion, which is understandable. On the one hand, some people feel that abortion is a fundamental women's rights issue, that our bodily autonomy is not up for debate, and that those who oppose abortion rights are trying to control women through oppressive legislation. On the other hand, some believe that a fetus is a human individual first and foremost, that no one has the right to terminate a human life, period, and that those who support abortion rights are heartless murderers.
Pro-choice and pro-life aren't mutually exclusive.Photo credit: Canva
And then there's the rest of us, who have personal, moral, and/or religious objections to abortion under many circumstances, but who choose to vote to keep abortion legal with few if any restrictions attached. According to a 2024 Pew Research report, there appear to be a whole lot of us. Most Americans (63%) want abortion to be legal with few or no restrictions, and most white non-evangelical Protestants (64%), most Black Protestants (71%), and most Catholics (59%) support abortion being legal in all or most cases. White evangelical Protestants were the only religious affiliation shared by Pew that believed abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
Some people don't understand being personally anti-abortion but politically pro-choice, citing the moral conflict seemingly inherent in that equation. But I don't feel conflicted about it at all. Here's why:
There are too many unknowns and far too much gray area to legislate abortion.
No matter what you personally believe, when exactly life begins and when “a clump of cells" should be considered an individual, autonomous human being with the same rights as a person who is not dependent on a woman's body for life is a completely debatable question with no clear scientific answers.
I believe life begins at conception, but that's my own religious belief about when the soul becomes associated with the body, not a proven scientific fact. As Arthur Caplan, award-winning professor of bioethics at New York University, told Slate, “Many scientists would say they don't know when life begins. There are a series of landmark moments. The first is conception, the second is the development of the spine, the third the development of the brain, consciousness, and so on."
There are many unanswerable questions about when life officially begins.Photo credit: Canva
But let's say, for the sake of argument, that a human life unquestionably begins at conception. Even with that point of view, there are too many issues that make a black-and-white approach to abortion too problematic to ban it. The biggest issue I see is that medicine is complex, and obstetrical medicine is particularly so. It's simply not as simple as "abortion is wrong." Every single pregnancy is personally and medically unique throughout the entire process—how can we effectively legislate something with so many individual variables that are always in flux?
Abortion bans hurt women, even those who desperately want their babies to live.
One reason I don't support banning abortion is that I've seen too many families deeply harmed by restrictive abortion laws.
I've heard too many stories of families who desperately wanted a baby, who ended up having to make the rock-and-a-hard-place choice to abort because the alternative would have been a short, pain-filled life for their child.
I've heard too many stories of mothers having to endure long, drawn out, potentially dangerous miscarriages and being forced to carry a dead baby inside of them because abortion restrictions gave them no other choice.
A midwife friend shared a story of a client with a super rare pregnancy condition that necessitated an abortion. She sent the client to her previous OB, who practiced in a state with strict abortion restrictions. Despite the mother's health declining quickly and zero chance of the fetus surviving, the OB couldn't help her without risking legal action because there was still a fetal heartbeat and the mother's life was not yet in enough danger to qualify for the "to save the mother's life" exception. The mother, going downhill with a deteriorating baby she very much wanted, had to be driven two hours to a hospital in another state to get the care she needed.
I've heard too many stories of abortion laws doing real harm to mothers and babies, and too many stories of families who were staunchly anti-abortion until they found themselves in circumstances they never could have imagined, to believe that abortion is always wrong and should be banned at any particular stage.
I refuse to serve as judge and jury on someone's medical decisions, and I don't think the government should, either.
Most people's anti-abortion views—mine included—are based on their religious beliefs, and I don't believe that anyone's religion should be the basis for the laws in our country. The Constitution makes that quite clear.
I also don't want politicians sticking their noses into my very personal medical choices. There are just too many circumstances (seriously, please read the stories linked in the previous section) that make abortion a choice I hope I'd never have to make but wouldn't want banned. I don't understand why the same people who decry government overreach think the government should be involved in these extremely personal medical decisions.
Abortion is a medical decision.Photo credit: Canva
And yes, ultimately, abortion is a personal medical decision. Even if I believe that a fetus is a human being at every stage, that human being's creation is inextricably linked to and dependent upon its mother's body. And while I don't think that means women should abort inconvenient pregnancies, I also acknowledge that trying to force a woman to grow and deliver a baby that she may not have chosen to conceive isn't something the government should be in the business of doing.
As a person of faith, my role is not to judge or vilify, but to love and support women who are facing difficult choices. The hard questions, the unclear rights and wrongs, the spiritual lives of those babies, I comfortably leave in God's hands, not the government's.
Research shows that if the goal is to prevent abortion, there are more effective ways than abortion bans.
The last big reason I vote the way I do is that, based on my research, pro-choice platforms actually provide the best chance of reducing abortion rates.
Just after Roe vs. Wade was passed, abortion rates skyrocketed, peaked around 1990, and then plummeted steadily for nearly two decades. Abortion was legal during that time, so clearly, keeping abortion legal and available did not result in increased abortion rates in the long run. And in the three years since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe vs. Wade, abortion rates in the U.S. have actually risen. So stricter laws don't seem to be lowering rates, either.
And the statistics globally seem to follow this pattern as well. Switzerland has one of the lowest abortion rates on Earth, and rates there have fallen and largely stabilized since 2002, when abortion became largely unrestricted.
Abortion laws don't stop abortion.Photo credit: Canva
Outlawing abortion doesn't stop abortion, it just pushes it underground and makes it more dangerous. And if a woman dies in a botched abortion, so does her baby. Banning abortion and imposing strict restrictions on it are a recipe for more lives being lost, not fewer.
Our laws should be based on the best data we have available. At this point, the only things consistently proven to reduce abortion rates on a societal scale are comprehensive sex education and easy, affordable access to birth control. The problem is, anti-abortion activists also tend to be the same people pushing for abstinence-only education and making birth control harder to obtain. But those goals can't co-exist with lowering abortion rates in the real world.
The polarization of politics has made it seem like the only choices are on the extreme ends of the spectrum, but it doesn't have to be that way. We can separate our own personal beliefs and convictions from what we believe the role of government should be. We can look at the data and recognize when bans may not actually be the most effective means of reducing something we want to see less of. We can listen to people's individual stories and acknowledge that things are not as black-and-white as they're made out to be.
We can want to see fewer abortions and still vote to keep abortion legal without feeling morally conflicted about it.
This article originally appeared six years ago and has been updated.
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