A Man’s Take on Abortion

I recently found myself discussing abortion in a human rights law class at university. We were considering the right to life and, more specifically, when life begins. It’s one of those questions that sounds relatively straightforward until you actually sit down and try to answer it.

Personally, I believe life begins at conception. But I also believe that women should have the right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy, and that abortion should be legally available until viability, for whatever reason a woman decides she needs one.

You might see a contradiction there. If I believe life begins at conception, how can I support abortion? If an embryo is alive, surely that must count for something? Do I think it’s right, therefore, to take a life?

These are questions I’ve thought about, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But the more I consider the issue, the more I return to a question that seems just as important as when life begins: why are we so concerned with deciding what women should be allowed to do with their own bodies?

And perhaps there’s an even more uncomfortable question for me to ask, as a man writing about abortion: what exactly is my place in this debate?