Complicated ethics - not

I am still puzzling why pregnancy reductions, along with sex-selection abortions, could or would, cause any consternation among "pro-choice" people.

Abortion advocates always tell us that abortion is all about it being a "woman’s choice" to end any pregnancy, whenever she chooses, and for any reason she chooses. So why would these two reasons for abortions be any worse than any other myriad of choices a woman can have to abort a child? This strikes me as rather illogical.

But I think I’ve come to actually understanding it. It is because these two particular "reasons" themselves have, or are becoming, widely known. And the reasons don’t sit right with everybody including some "pro-choicers".

In other words, if we ignore these two reasons for having an abortion, all other reasons a woman can have are usually private, so they don’t get put into a public "reason".

"Pro-choicers" simply rationalize a woman’s choice to abort as being a choice she made, but we don’t usually know what the reason was for that choice. We only know she has "chosen" to terminate her pregnancy. And "pro-choicers" will say, that a woman has a "right" to do that.

As an example, there are any number of other reasons women choose to have an abortion. For instance, because she can’t raise a child herself. Or because she is poor. Or because she forgot to take birth control. Or because she will not be able to go to the prom.

Now if we were to take any one of these other reasons and all of a sudden say "We now know that many women are aborting their unborn babies because it will interfere with a woman’s ability to attend her prom", there would be (like in a pregnancy reduction) a lot of "complicated ethics" coming into play here, because now we have provided an actual reason why a subset of women are aborting their babies.

We rightly judge that reason as being valid or not. And many people, even those of the "pro-choice" persuasion, get uncomfortable, depending on that reason.

As long as we stick to that convenient euphemistic "choice" word, it’s much easier to trick our moral compass into thinking any abortion is okay. In fact, we really don’t want to know the reason do we?