I've had trouble defining my view on abortion. Am I pro-choice or pro-life? Or is it some funky middle ground?
I used to pick the middle ground option, but recently I realized that pro-lifers and pro-choicers define their positions the same way. Pro life means life starts at conception and not a moment later. Pro-choicers believe that life begins at any point after conception. I think both sides would mostly agree on those definitions.
This puts me under the umbrella of pro-choice. It's hard not to be since the pro-choice side has cast such a large tent. I think I have a lot of differences with what almost all pro-choice people believe, but that's a debate within the tent.
How do you make me pro-life? Well, cast a wider tend and stop staying with 100% certainty that life begins at conception and not a moment later. Or give me a reasonable explanation of why life does begin at conception, and I'll change my mind. As it stands, it seems to me that the only reason Evangelical Christians in particular are so enamoured with pro-life is because its a sacred belief they use to determine membership in the Evangelical Christian Ring. That kind of magic doesn't work on the anti-social like me, so I need another explanation.
The bigger lesson to all this is that when one side has taken one sliver of the possible answers, and the other side has taken everything outside of that, baseline assumption is that the other side is right.
