Fuck it, I’m writing a post about abortion, because debates about the subject rarely include what I personally think are the most relevant philosophical and scientific points. Here’s why I’m ardently pro-choice. I originally wrote this as a Twitter thread (lol) that I didn’t end up posting, hence the formatting.

First of all, let’s acknowledge that the idea that life begins at conception is unsubstantiated and rooted in religion. Religious people used to oppose contraception “because God says so”, too. (Some still do.)

Embryos/fetuses don’t feel pain during abortion (the majority haven’t developed nerve endings yet, and those that have because the abortion is happening later for a medical reason are medicated), and abortion doesn’t prevent a woman from having future children, just like contraception doesn’t prevent her from getting pregnant in the future.

Therefore, opposition to abortion is generally based on the idea that every embryo or fetus is some unique “soul” (a religious notion) that simply MUST be grown into a human baby because an egg got fertilized.

(Never mind the fact that contraception, which many “pro-life” people now use, stops the potential for new Homo sapiens to be born too — usually only a few weeks earlier.)

Life doesn’t begin when a sperm cell fertilizes an egg. Energy can’t be created or destroyed — only transferred from one source to another. You can’t destroy life. It just IS. We live on a giant ball of energy and all birth and death is just that energy transferring from one source to another within that ball.

Abortion simply halts one specific type of energy transfer from a woman’s body to a newborn baby. A man provides a sperm cell, and the woman does all the work to take it from “zygote” to “newborn baby”.

ALL LIFE IS INTERCONNECTED. We humans are obsessed with putting things into neat categories and using “exists in a vacuum” thinking rather than recognizing that, and it shows how much intellectual progress we still have to make.

Life doesn’t just spring up one day when an egg gets fertilized — energy from two sex cells has just been combined into a new thing that is not a human, but is slightly closer to becoming a human than the individual sex cells that formed it.

There are fungi that are more intelligent than animals, and animals that are more intelligent and capable of feeling pain and complex emotions than human babies. Humans are not in some separate category of life, whatever religious people like to think — they’re just at the top of the food chain.

This has shown itself to be a bad thing for life on earth generally, as we’ve caused the extinction of thousands of species and are destroying the land WE OURSELVES depend on for continued existence. We’ve “terminated” SO much life through our reckless attitude to the environment.

And when we terminate an entire species, it’s never coming back. The potential for that species to exist again is gone. Contrarily, an abortion simply ends the development of one gestating Homo sapiens, and doesn’t diminish our ability to perpetuate our species at all.

“Pro-life” people are usually the same people who are thoroughly uninterested in preserving other forms of life on earth — they operate under the assumption that humans are special in some divine way outside of just being at the top of the food chain, and are the only thing worth preserving.

(This, of course, is an ignorant perspective because it fails to acknowledge that preserving human life means preserving the planet we depend on to live — we’re just in a period right now where our destruction hasn’t caught up to privileged people yet.)

Poor people suffer the most (and the earliest) from the impacts of environmental destruction. Impoverished women around the world will miscarry, have stillborn babies, or watch their children die because of environmental destruction that pro-life people are complicit in.

But of course, understanding that requires more than a one-step thinking process, because you have to be able to analyze multiple interconnected factors, which dogmatic people are usually bad at doing.

It is far easier to think, “Abortion is bad, therefore I am good because I oppose it” than to put in the work required to understand the disparate amounts of suffering each abortion stance will create for this world.

Most abortions occur before a fetus can feel pain. Those that don’t are almost always aborted for medical reasons. Meanwhile, there are MILLIONS of humans and animals on earth with MUCH greater capacities for pain and emotion who have tremendous suffering unnecessarily inflicted on them at the hands of humans.

Of course, if you buy into the idea that humans are somehow divine or special in this universe, you might not care about this. But if you recognize that consciousness is a spectrum, and that different species have difficult capacities to feel pain and emotion, you are more likely to be disturbed by this reality.

Pro-life people also tend to be the least supportive of their society having strong social safety nets (in the US, at least), which means they are complicit in the unnecessary suffering (even death) of millions of human children and adults every year.

Many children are traumatized for life because they are born in poverty, or to mothers and fathers who aren’t equipped to care for them emotionally (trauma passes down through generations), or because they’re put in the horrifyingly inadequate foster care system. Apathy toward (or opposition to) strengthening social safety nets MAKES CHILDREN SUFFER.

But religious people generally have a very different view of suffering to me. They often view it as necessary, character-building, or what people deserve because of their life choices. I can’t go into how little they tend to understand about the concept of “choice” right now but:

Traumatized children are generally bad for society. They grow into traumatized adults who are statistically much more likely to harm others — including children. (Their own or someone else’s.) Of course, there are people who are traumatized as children and manage to heal from it and do a lot of good in the world, but if we’re trying to create healthier, happier societies, we’d be wise to mitigate childhood trauma as much as we can, because it’s responsible for the creation of a lot of “bad” people.

Pro-life people also tend to be apathetic about (or actively against) providing good sex education to young people, and increasing access to contraception — THE VERY THINGS THAT WOULD LOWER THE ABORTION RATE.

I think you’d struggle to find someone MORE pro-choice than me. But I still want to lower the abortion rate. Duh. I don’t want women having to go through something shitty when they don’t have to. That’s why I support effective abortion-prevention strategies — not dogmatic ones that are proven not to work.

I could write an entire essay on how lazy and ignorant it is to feel morally superior because you oppose abortion, but I won’t right now. Someone being “pro-life” is, to me, a clear sign that they haven’t put nearly as much thought into their position as they should have — because they likely inherited it from their family or religion or culture.

The only HONEST reason someone can give for opposing abortion is, “I believe human life is divine/special in some way and that life begins at conception.” That’s why I avoid debating abortion with religious people who hold that view. It’s unsubstantiated and you can’t prove a negative.

Also, the idea that women should put their babies up for adoption rather than abort is insane. Putting a woman through 9 months of misery (and more, thanks to the emotional ramifications of birthing a baby you give away) to prevent zero to nominal suffering in an unconscious fetus? That’s not morally superior.

That’s selfishly sticking to your unsubstantiated dogma because you don’t have the desire or intellectual capability to properly assess the incredibly disparate amounts of suffering caused by each potential route.

Not to mention that low-income women who don’t have proper access to contraception are disproportionately impacted by restrictive abortion laws.

If I found out I was pregnant right now (which I won’t, because I have an implant that’s a.) 100% effective and b.) covered by my insurance), I’d pay whatever, go wherever, do whatever to have an abortion. But many women aren’t as privileged as me.

Religious people love to impose their ideas about sex and morality onto others in incredibly cruel ways. Christianity is rife with the idea that humans deserve punishment for their sins, and sex is one of its big ones.

So we get allegedly “good” people who see nothing wrong with forcing a woman to carry an embryo or fetus to term because she wasn’t lucky enough to be born somewhere with proper access to affordable contraception. No compassion, because “We don’t make the rules, God does.”

(You do make the rules. That’s why your religion has changed its perspective on things like contraception as society has increased in knowledge and understanding and compassion.)

The entire argument that, “You shouldn’t have sex if you aren’t willing to become a parent” is — like all mainstream pro-life arguments — rooted in unsubstantiated religious beliefs. We have safe ways to prevent pregnancy and safe ways to terminate pregnancies — why on earth should someone not enjoy a fundamental human desire?

Because God said so? That’s not a valid argument in a world with agreed-upon standards of logic and reason. Your God has said a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff since his inception, much of it terrible.

My personal mission in life is to reduce suffering. When you examine the issue of abortion properly, you see that FAR more suffering is inflicted on the world when women are forced to carry embryos or fetuses to term than is inflicted on unconscious embryos or fetuses during abortion.

So if your argument for opposing abortion is, “God said it’s wrong”, fine. At least you’re being honest. But don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s a selfless position that reduces suffering. It doesn’t — it creates it. The idea of believing in a God who’s fine with that makes me sad.

Being pro-choice shows much more respect for human life than being willing to increase suffering in the world because of illusions of the self/dogma about the existence of souls.