Being pro-choice makes the most sense in this debate.

Since my last column on sexuality was so well-received by the Christian community at our school, I’ve decided to address a topic that will perhaps push the limits of the whole “love thy neighbor” thing.

The anti-abortionists are going to love this one.

By the way, I use the term “anti-abortion” because “pro-life” implies any number of things that aren’t necessarily true. I find it laughable that people who support torture, war, capital punishment, even the bombing of abortion clinics, can identify themselves as “pro-life.”

Abortion is not murder.

I’m sure that statement is agreeable to everyone, but just in case, I’ll elaborate.

Murder, by definition, means “wrongful killing,” so to argue against abortion simply by claiming that “it’s murder” raises a question.

The issue of abortion is not a debate over whether killing is involved. It is a question of whether it is “wrongful” killing or not.

Before I get into the heart of the ethics of this I would just like to point out that the idea that a fertilized egg is a human being is ludicrous. An embryo is no more a human being than an egg is a chicken.

A collection of cells undergoing mitosis does not a human make. If it did, then around 80 percent of humans beings end up dying before they are even born as they surf their way out of a woman’s body on a wave of menstrual blood.

Yet, I have never attended a funeral for a single one of these “people.”

If you believe that “life” occurs at the moment of conception, then I believe you should start organizing rescue missions to fish all of the pads and tampons out of the garbage in order to save all of those “lives.”

But let us focus on the “pro-choice” ethics of this, rather than the liberally biased science.

I believe that Judith Jarvis Thomson posed two of the best arguments against taking control over a woman’s body against her will.

She makes her arguments by posing scenarios that entail ethical actions. Think about how you would feel in either of these situations. (My apologies to those in the philosophy/ethics department. I know these are paraphrased. I’d print the entirety if I could …)

Scenario #1: You wake up in a hospital and find yourself surgically attached to a famous artist. This artist has a renal disease that will cause him to die.

However, the art society, in an effort to save him, has kidnapped you and attached the artist’s body to yours. Your body not only allows the artist to live, it will save his life, if you allow him to remain attached to you for nine months.

Does the artist’s “right to life” supersede your right to have control over your own body?

Now, this scenario is obviously more analogous to situations where rape is involved, rather than the majority of circumstances when abortions are performed.

However, it does seem morally inconsistent to say that abortions are permissible in situations of rape or incest, if you take a general stance against abortion. An embryo certainly can’t control the circumstances of its inception.

Why does it lose the “right to life” that all other embryos have? Does God care about some embryos, but not others?

Scenario #2: You live in a world where “people seeds” drift through the air. If these people seeds take root in your carpet, they grow into children that you are responsible for.

Since you don’t want children, you place a screen on your window, knowing that sometimes screens are defective.

As it turns out, you end up purchasing one of the one in 100 screens that fails, and a person takes root in your carpet. Do you have the moral obligation to give the people plants unrestricted use of your home?

Now I’m about as much of a fan of Darwin as they come. However, even I see the problems involved in treating women as if they were nothing more than disposable incubators for the next generation.

The fact of the matter is that every pregnancy carries a gargantuan list of health risks. Among them are the inability to take certain medications, ectopic pregnancy, diabetes, hypertension, anemia, varicose veins, stroke, heart attack and death.

That whole “death” part really makes it difficult for me to take the “pro-life” label seriously.

So ask yourself, why should “rights” be given to a clump of human tissue, at the expense of the rights of an actual human being in our society?

Author’s Note: I’d like to thank Dr. Puritan for any concept I have of the nature of morality in general. I would strongly endorse his ethics course to anybody who believes that they have a moral theory that is not utterly hypocritical and meaningless.

Travis Grogan is a political science and communications senior.

A compromise is the best way to solve this debate.

I believe the art of politics is compromise. Therefore, why do we refuse to compromise on the important subject of “life,” specifically evident in the case of abortions?

That seems crazy to me, yet pro-lifers seem to refuse to budge an inch, for fear that the pro-choicers will take a mile; and visa-versa.

Therefore, nothing changes.

Pro-choicers get stuck defending the abhorrent practice of partial-birth abortion, and pro-lifers get stuck saying that the morning-after pill is the same as murdering a 2-year-old child.

Often in politics, the best way to ensure you don’t get anything of what you want is to insist on getting everything you want: and meanwhile, unborn babies are dying.

I am pro-life to the core of my being. I am opposed to all unnecessary violence toward any life, but especially human life.

To me, abortion is based on the flawed assumption that violence solves things. But that’s wrong! Violence exacerbates problems; it never solves them.

Yet, despite being pro-life in my values, I do not vote pro-life. In fact, if I voted, I would vote pro-choice to a degree.

I believe politics should be the art of uniting the state around a particular resolution. In America, a very pluralistic society, these issues are very complex, and we should recognize that others have good convictions, even if they disagree with us.

I don’t believe that there is a single, unambiguous way to settle complex issues – including abortion – in the political sphere.

First, it is doubtful that outlawing abortions is the best way of preventing them. If abortions are highest in places with poverty, then maybe a candidate who is pro-choice but has a better economic model would do more to save these lives than a pro-life candidate who doesn’t address poverty.

And is our goal to save lives or is it to vote “pro-life”?

If one wants to take part in the solution to the abortion debate, one needs compromises that could be agreed on by most everyone. Clearly the extremes are not useful for uniting all Americans. So I propose a compromise.

What if we took the legal criterion for personhood at death and reversed it for the beginning of legal personhood? When a person’s brain activity falls beneath a minimum threshold, we in American society do not consider them a legal person.

So, what if we agreed that when a fetus’ brain activity rises above this minimum threshold, we consider them a legal person, possessing all the rights of persons in the U.S. (including the right to life)?

Gregory Boyd, a pastor in Minnesota, has proposed this idea on his Web site, and he says, “This occurs around the ninth or tenth week of pregnancy” (though obviously it varies based on individual cases).

I think this situation would work to unite us in outlawing the practice of abortion later. After all, most people (at least that I talk to) intuitively think that the later an abortion is, the worse it is.

Likewise, the more abortions we have, the worse it is. Therefore, under my proposal (or Greg Boyd’s proposal rather), we would have far fewer abortions later, and we would have fewer abortions period.

We would be saving more lives under this compromise than in our current situation. And, I believe we could adopt this proposal. I don’t believe this idea is unreasonable.

Now, I don’t present this idea because I believe that life is valuable with brainwaves above a certain threshold. Nor do I present this idea because I believe souls enter at this time or for other religious reasons.

I simply propose this because I feel the need for compromise in the abortion debate, and I feel this is a good compromise. Under my proposal, all abortions past the ninth or tenth week of pregnancy (past the brain wave threshold, whatever that is) would be outlawed, but before then, one would be legally allowed to get an abortion.

I make no moral judgments (except to say that I support life at all stages) because the situation is far too complicated to be dogmatic. I believe laws should be based on compromise and natural law that appeals to everyone’s moral intuitions.

Under this compromise (among others), we would work toward what most of us want (fewer abortions) and save more lives of unborn children.

Regardless of how we feel about the moral judgments, I feel that if we are deciding laws, we should try to work together, to unite with most of the people in society, and come up with a compromise.

Being dogmatic, condemning and judgmental (which I think comes from both sides of the abortion debate) will only result in you not getting anything of what you want, for no one likes someone who has to have everything his or her way.

Joshua Huff is a philosophy and economics senior.