What made me pro-life

I've gone and gotten myself into another abortion discussion over at Pandagon. (Why do I do that? Why? Am I really such a masochist? Wouldn't it just be easier to smash my testicles with a hammer a few times?) It seems to me to be a good time to relate the incident that convinced me that abortion was wrong.

It's not for religious reasons. It really isn't. My Lovely and Brilliant Wife and I refrain from contraception because we're Catholic. That's our business, and our call to make. I don't care if anybody else does or not (although people who contracept and call themselves practicing Catholics annoy me through hypocrisy.) I'm well aware of Catholic teaching on abortion, but my reasons are rooted in something that happened before I joined the Church.

Nine years ago, one of my co-workers had a baby prematurely. Very prematurely. The little boy was born about four months early, and he weighed a little over a pound. I don't recall how long he was in the hospital in Spokane, but it was for several months. What I found incongruous was that an abortion at that stage of his development would have been legal in all 50 states, but instead, enormous amounts of money and effort were expended to keep him alive. The sole difference between him and an abortable fetus was that his mother wanted him to live. The law considered him human only because she did.

To place one individual's human rights at the sole discretion of another individual is to make human rights meaningless. The blather about "potential persons" and "a parasitic clump of cells" is window dressing. The fact is that either that little boy's life was extremely valuable, to the point of some really impressive work on the part of the medical staff at the hospital, or it was worthless and he belonged in the dumpster. To make that a "woman's choice" is to say that all life is equally worthless unless a woman validates it. It's simply not a matter of women's rights vs. men's, and anybody who tries to frame it that way is merely not willing to admit that there are some things that nobody is entitled to do. Placing the acquisition of human rights at birth is arbitrary, as my co-worker's child demonstrates.

And if anybody's interested, the boy is now a healthy, active, bright and larger-than-average eight-year-old. I call him "Thud."

Update: I finally gave up on the discussion at Pandagon. My flimsy logic couldn't stand up to well-reasoned discourse like this:

I prefer viciously mocking him, calling him a liar, an idiot, and a fucktard.

“YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING! GO KILL YOURSELF!”

Hully gee! I guess yuh got me there!