Abortion

I recently discovered that an acquaintance of mine had an abortion not too long ago. OK, it happens. But I also found out that she was kind of bummed out about it, not because she was taking a life, but because it meant she couldn't go to the gym for a few days. I'm serious.

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While anecdotal, I doubt this attitude is unique. It's sad in the extreme that people have become so casual over what should be a rather difficult decision. Find out you're pregnant on Monday, get the abortion on Wednesday. Problem solved.

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Now, as with drugs, I'm not convinced that the answer to abortion is prohibition. Like Bill Clinton, I think abortion should be safe, legal and rare, with an emphasis on that last part.

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But I don't think abortion is rare. According to this site roughly 1,370,000 abortions occur annually in the U.S. People use it as a contraceptive. I remember in high school a girl I knew told me that she had friends who had had multiple abortions. And they were no older than 18!

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Abortion is sad for so many reasons, but one that sticks out for me is how self-centered it is. A baby would inconvience me, therefore I'll just abort it. This is not always the attitude, but it often is. It makes us more free from the responsibility of our actions. It's all about me.

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The story about this girl having the abortion also makes me kind of angry at militant abortion supporters. You know, the NARAL crowd. The kind that think that abortion is not a necessary evil, but an active good. It sometimes seems that some people think it should be not only accepted, but celebrated.

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Well, NARAL, you've succeeded. Little by little we are chipping away at the stigma attached to abortion until going to get the procedure done is no different than a trip to the dentist.

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Again, I'm not saying that abortion should be illegal, or that everyone who has an abortion is an awful person. But jeez, we've really come to a bad place when the decision has become this casual.

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PS-I wonder how many of the hard-core abortion supporters out there are also big opponents of the death penalty? Or think that war is "never the answer."

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Update: If we want to reduce abortion this probably isn't a smart way to go about it.