Reply #23: I was won by rationality...

[Jackie97]

Just like McCorvey was supposedly "won by love".

When I was a kid, I was pro-choice because my big sister was. When I turned 14, I turned anti-choice because I got into fundamentalism. However, my pastor talked me into being for abortion being allowed in life threatening cases (all he had to do was give his opinion, and I was won over like sheep).

Then, a friend of mine was in a relationship of domestic violence. The abuse was mostly psychological, but the stress from the abuse nearly killed her in her pregnancy. That got me thinking about whether she should have an abortion if she just got pregnant again with him in her life. Next, I also went to college and studied what an embryo and fetus was actually like (outside the anti-abortion propoganda I was used to). That got me slowing dropping the concept that it was a person. I also took Sociology courses. I would look up abortion in the books, and find ideas that most of the time made me come to the conclusion that anti-abortion laws were not the way to solve the "abortion problem", that it would only lead out to illegal abortions.

Meanwhile, I "met" somebody online who made it his duty to convert me. I made it clear to him that he would have to present me with unbiased sources (because I would not trust anything else). He did a lot of that because he was older than me and realized that I had a real potential of becoming pro-choice with age and with more knowledge about things. He also realized I was already considering becoming pro-choice before I even said I was considering it. In that phase of my becoming pro-choice, I was discovering that countries with less or no anti-abortion laws had fewer abortions than we did because they had fewer problems with poverty and certain other problems.

Then I got back to thinking about my friend in the Domestic Violence situation, and realized that I wished that she would have an abortion if she ever got pregnant again because I just didn't want her to die of having to wait for a doctor to declare her life in danger. I knew she would never have an abortion, but I realized then that a woman can be in a lot of situations where she badly needs an abortion and shouldn't have to go through politicians and courts to have to obtain one.

So, I passively became pro-choice. I still thought the embryo/fetus was a person though for a while. That changed in about a year or less when I finally admitted to myself that I didn't think the embryo/fetus was a person.

So, now I'm pro-choice. I don't have my beliefs because my big sister has them. I don't have them because my preacher says it is okay. I don't have them because of my religion in general. I don't have them because I was won by love.

I have my beliefs now because I researched the subject, looked at situations with others in real life, and because of people who were willing to answering some of my questions. I didn't always accept the answers that they gave. I picked out what answers I chose to believe were true (most of the time with research being done). In other words, I became pro-choice because it's actually what I believe in. I was won by rationality.