An Epidemic

There seems to be an epidemic going around. The epidemic encourages people to do whatever they can to avoid looking for and settling upon the truth. This strange fad is concerned with more than just truth in religious terms. It also infects the moral and political scenes of our lives.

The best and most seen example I have of this is abortion (naturally). Now, it is already a huge topic because anything concerned with life and death is a huge matter. More than by any other position, I am baffled by those who teeter back and forth on a vague fence saying women must be in difficult situations when they find themselves unexpectedly pregnant. "These women face decisions that must be difficult, that are decisions we would never personally wish to take, but that we should meet them with understanding, caution, patience" and so on. To which, my brain usually picks up and I am ready to wager my savings that they will see even something as slight as vague "inconvenience" as a reason to terminate a pregnancy and end a life.

But that's the thing: no one wants to admit that the resolution to a "difficult position" is the ending of a life. No one wants to acknowledge an unborn child's right to life. Instead it is passed off as a woman's right to the conduct and regulation of her body. Then, once you've asked some defining questions and gotten a discussion going to make them confront the issue, they feign some sort of superior understanding--that such discussions are not best discussed this way, or even discussed at all (what??); that this is a much more subjective issue than it is; that not being female or a minority means you can have no accurate analysis of the problem; that sticking to rules and right and wrong is not the way to go about living life (again, what??)--and exit the conversation.

It would be one thing if people settled on taking the opposite view: abortion is right in all circumstances. All should be free to do whatever they please. Some people do advertise these claims, whether their media is a comment section of a webpage or the streets of New York City fit with megaphones. At least in these cases, people are being completely honest with what they believe and advertising it as such.

But what middle ground can you fall upon on serious matters? Is there any point at which when you say, "I believe abortion is only okay in x, y and z cases," that it really means only that and does not mean that you are marching along with the rest of the pro-choicers? What value can you put on life when you claim abortion is okay in some circumstances? When you start talking about rights to abortions and how such a right is a women's health issue, you start to lose credibility with me because you are blatantly ignoring the real issue here. From the moment of conception, a person begins. A person separate from your body, a person deserving a chance at life, a person who should be treated as more than an inconvenience or a difficult decision or a private affair to be dealt with by those in the relationship, because life is of concern to more than just two people. How many lives have you affected by existing? The number far surpasses the two whose genes and mistakenly-spent night made you.

You know what should be dealt with in a relationship? The possibility of children before they actually happen. Responsibility for themselves and any life they bring into the world. If we do not act on reason and responsibility, how different are we from animals?

Perhaps this is what drives the desire for not using labels like "right" and "wrong." People want to avoid responsibility and instead accept any choices because either (a) it isn't our business or (b) responsibility is never an issue if it isn't defined. This ambiguous treatment of right and wrong will only infiltrate every important matter until everything is acceptable. Though, as more time passes, the only thing that becomes unacceptable is the voicing of one's differing opinion. No matter how mildly or generally it is expressed, it is taken as a harsh personal attack. Shouldn't we converse about these things--as rational creatures do--before jumping to conclusions which make it harder to narrow down the truth at hand?