It's Really Not Complicated

There's some awfully good writing on the web today concerning abortion. First, GWPDA, in comments at Eschaton, pointed me to this:

It’s not my role to judge the patients. I’m not God. My patients have rights.
My patients have feelings. My patients have needs, and I need to listen to
them. We live in a world where we don’t have a fail-proof method of birth
control. We don’t have a school system that allows us to teach young
children where babies come from. We don’t have a police system that
prevents rape and incest. We don’t have a scientific community that can
guarantee every woman, when she's pregnant, that the fetus is normal. As
long as we live in this imperfect society, women have to have the right to be
able to terminate a pregnancy. If we could guarantee every woman that
she’s only pregnant when she wants to be, we wouldn’t have to have
abortions any more.”
—Robert Tamis, MD
Paradise Valley, AZ

And T. Thorn Coyle has a two-part post that includes this very profound bit of wisdom:

Let me say this, clearly: An adult woman’s life is more valuable to me than the life of a fetus. A fetus is potential. An adult is action. Both are part of the sacred flow, yes, but if a choice must be made, I know where I stand. I eat things in order to live, are these things not a part of sacred flow? They are. Every time I breathe, I’m harming and killing microbes of all sorts. Are they not part of sacred flow? They are. These things are sacred, and still, I choose to live, and hope to contribute something to this cosmosphere that is worthy of all the little lives I take each day. I would not be living this life if I had a 20 year old whom I had raised. For some, parenting is a powerful, gracious act that feeds their lives. For me, this was not to be so.
. . .

One man who joined us yesterday was there because he had friends who had died from botched, illegal abortions. Even with limited and dangerous options, those women still needed to choose. May we honor life by honoring our ability to personally make strong and difficult choices, in order to best support the unfolding of life’s path. May the sacred move through us, informing our decisions. May we act with an impulse toward life in all its varied glory. May we make choices, like adults, with full consciousness of our acts and the risk of their consequences. May we live fully, honorably, and contribute our very best to give back to the fabric of all.

I'd add something, except for the fact that I think those two posts pretty much say it all.

Picture found here.