The other side of the abortion debate

Home Opinion The other side of the abortion debate

I walked into the State Street Starbucks in Ann Arbor and carefully chose my arena. My nemesis approached.

Since I first comprehended abortion, I have thought that I understood the pro-life argument. I have always believed that life begins at conception and that abortion kills innocent babies that’s the Southern culture I grew up in.

I came to think that anyone who disagreed with me must either be sadistic or dumber than dirt. After all, a person would have to be sadistic to want the human being growing inside her to be scorched to death by an instillation of saline. And she would have to be beyond dumb not to see that a death like that was a murder of an innocent human being.

My nemesis took the chair opposite me. A feminist women’s studies major and president of Students for Choice at the University of Michigan, Sophia Kotov surprised me by also being a lovely, intelligent, compassionate woman.

She graciously explained to me that a woman has a choice to control what goes on in her own body. She needs to make that choice based on adequate knowledge, with access to adequate resources. To her, women possess a right to have an abortion as part of their right to free expression.

“People believe that they are real children people believe that it’s wrong,” Kotov told me. “I don’t want to invalidate that, but I fundamentally disagree with them. I think a lot of the pro-life rhetoric comes from wanting to control women’s bodies, and using innocent children as a distraction. If they really didn’t want children to get aborted they would invest a lot of money in children being adopted. They would be the ones handing out condoms on campus. They would be the ones advocating for birth control.”

For almost half-an-hour, Kotov answered my questions, patiently helped me out with the terminology, and revisited points for clarity. She never implied that the pro-life movement was illegitimate, or that its members were crazy, offensive freaks.

It’s not that she lacked the motivation. Growing up, I became familiar with our terminology. I still often hear our opponents described as “evil,” “murderers,” and “baby-killers.” Do we not regularly rally behind gruesome photos of bloody corpses and horrifying statistics, zealously agreeing with each other? Do thousands of us not rally on the National Mall every year, to protest what the March for Life describes as the “greatest human rights violation of our time”?

She didn’t bring up any of these things she didn’t have to. By the end of  the half-hour, Sophia had me convinced. I am pro-choice. But not in the same sense that she is.

I believe that a woman has the choice to control her own body, and that she should be aware of the potential consequences of her actions. I don’t believe that she made any invalid arguments.

However, I do fundamentally disagree with Kotov’s foundational point: A woman does not have the right to freely express herself however she chooses and eschew all consequences, including pregnancy.

That half-hour conversation with “the other side” taught me more about the women’s choice issue than all my years of homeschool speech and debate. My opponent was neither sadistic nor dumb. She, too, is pro-life. She doesn’t deny the beauty or value of each human being.

Throughout my previous experience with the controversy, I thought in a world of closed-minded dogmatism, reading about, yet never truly interacting with “the other side.” Yet Kotov’s un-aggressive style humanized both her opinion and her entire movement, and demonstrated that the two sides of the argument are not mutually exclusive.

So perhaps, instead of rallying, arguing, and accusing the other side amongst ourselves, we should try more earnestly to understand the people and positions opposed to us. No argument is made more valid by labeling the opposition “baby-killers” or “murderers.” No person becomes more relatable by expressing horror or disgust at something you advocate. Nobody wants to feel rejected. No rally becomes more effective with the addition of posters of bloody fetuses. Whether you believe they’re actually human or not, nobody wants to see that.

Kotov demonstrated to me that a patient, open minded opponent is the most dangerous kind.