Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa penned an op-ed for The Dallas Morning News explaining why she voted for Beto O'Rourke for US Senator from Texas. I love Destiny, and not just because she was the only one who begged me "Please don't go" when I quit blogging in 2010. She's probably one of the few writers who could successfully coax me to come back. She's a terrific writer, but she is also open-minded enough to consider alternative viewpoints. How else could a pro-life feminist consider voting for Beto O'Rourke?
Anyway, so here I am back at the keyboard. Read her op-ed, then come back here and read my open letter to Destiny.
Destiny, congratulations on a provocative op-ed that is sure to cause you no end of trouble within the pro-life community. But it's spurred me to respond, so there's that to balance things. ;-)
I have to ask whether you passed your op-ed past a pro-choice person to review how well you captured the beliefs and attitudes that you ascribe to them. Because you decided like them to vote for Beto O'Rourke, it doesn't necessarily mean you've exactly captured their thinking. In my case, you made some mistakes that I thought you might like to know.
"This idea of eliminating abortion by simply making it illegal is far too low of a bar to set."
Pro-choice people don't think it's too low of a bar to set. They think it's too high of a bar to set. Because making it illegal doesn't eliminate abortion. It just drives it underground, where it was for decades and decades before Roe with terrible consequences for women. Pro-choice people favor all the stuff you do, like proper health care for women that reduces the need for abortion. That should be low bar because how can anyone be against that? Pro-choice people consider having the state dictate what happens to a woman's body to be a very high bar. You know that's going to resisted. Why start with that highest of bars?
"I do not believe Beto O'Rourke or honestly most pro-choice people are "pro-abortion." They almost all know it's a very difficult choice because it takes a human life. Science tells us that."
Agreed that almost all pro-choice people are not pro-abortion. But the science is not in dispute. Sure, a fertilized egg is alive and it's human. But so was the egg before fertilization. And so was the sperm. Science doesn't define when human life begins. As far as science is concerned, life began once, about 3.5 billion years ago and it's been going strong since, with all sorts of odd and wonderful means of reproduction, with one line of the tree of life eventually becoming what we now call human. The real question to many pro-choice people is not a scientific question but a legal one.
When do legal rights pass to a developing fetus? Even born babies aren't given all the legal rights that adults have. It's not surprising that fetuses might be accorded fewer legal rights than born babies. And zygotes the least legal rights of all. Sperm and eggs have no legal rights. Pro-choice people recognize that different people, all in good faith, might think differently about those legal questions. That's what makes legalizing abortion a difficult choice, not the science. It's the kind of issue that from a legal point of view should be open to compromise. But as long as pro-life people take an absolutist position, that life begins at conception with all the legal rights accorded to born babies, compromise will never be possible. Still, even if compromise isn't possible, taking those "low bar" actions that make the need for abortion rare should be a no-brainer for both sides.
So even though you didn't quite get the pro-choice thinking exactly right, you still end up in more or less the same place. Vote for candidates who advocate for sensible steps to reduce the number of infant deaths, of deaths during childbirth, of deaths from "back alley" botched abortions, etc. There's enough common ground for us to accomplish great things, even while we continue to agonize over the hardest thing to agree on.
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