Black and White

First off, I wish everyone well on this Ash Wednesday as we enter the season of Lent.

The world is a wonderful, colorful place. There are plants of different colors, houses of different colors, animals of different colors, and people of different colors.

I must warn you, though. Not everyone lives in this colorful world. Some people live in a world of black and white.

I'm talking about anti-abortion people. I've been seeing a trend lately, where everything they say is watered down into an "either-or" situation; a black and white world.

Now, I will give the benefit of the doubt and say this could be due in part to twitters extremely short 140 character limit. I know I've watered down a few things I've said because I didn't feel like sending 20 tweets. However, twitter is not the only location where this is happening. We see this black&white stance on facebook, on blogs, in the news, etc. It's everywhere.

I believe that antis create a black and white world because a colorful world, with areas of gray, would destroy their position. For instance:

Murder. Many, many, many antis have told me that taking a life is murder. Period. Anytime you kill a human being, it's murder. Upon this reasoning, they claim abortion is murder.

But looking at this, it should be obvious to us why this is wrong. Not all killing is murder. We have wars, death penalty, suicide, manslaughter, self-defense, police action, and more. There are multiple types of legal killing, and multiple types of illegal killing. If we believe that abortion is killing, that does not make us conclude that abortion is murder.


Another example is the safety of abortion. Antis will tell you that abortion is always dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. It's always bad and unhealthy for the woman. It's always going to give her horrible depression.

However, there are plenty of women who speak in public and online who can testify that abortion does not always cause depression or physical complications or anything else they claim. There are women who will speak up and tell you that childbirth would have killed them, and abortion saved their life.

There are also women who have been hurt by abortion, both physically and mentally. It is not a perfect thing, abortion. As a medical procedure, just like others, it has a failure rate.

As we can see, the issue of abortion safety is not black and white. For some women, abortion is safer than pregnancy and childbirth. For other women, childbirth is safer than abortion. By accepting this, we accept that the best option for each woman is different.

Antichoicers cannot accept that. They cannot accept that abortion could be a best choice for anyone. They cannot accept that pregnancy could be dangerous for anyone. Their black and white world does not allow for that recognition.


Until antichoicers learn to live in color, and to celebrate all the differences among us, we will never be able to make progress or work to reduce the unplanned pregnancy rate. Because there is no one set method which will lead us forward- we must mix together multiple different aspects to reach our goal.