Let me start by pissing everybody off. I think both sides of this debate have important things to say. If women have no access to abortion, they have no freedom to determine the course of their lives. But when the anti-choice people tell us the fetus should be respected as a human in progress, we should listen. Even if we must take a life, we should recognize that it is sacred, and grieve the necessity of its loss.

Being a mother is a heavy responsibility. The pregnancy is the least of it, though being pregnant is uncomfortable, inconvenient, and challenging to your physical and mental health. By the time a baby is born, you are tied to the child forever on an emotional level, whether or not you keep it to raise. You brought a new person into this difficult and dangerous world, and the fate of this tiny being in large part depends on you.

In America, it’s a struggle for families to stay together. Many jobs pay barely enough to support one person, never mind two or three, and lack of money can ruin even relationships that began in love and tenderness. There is not much corporate or governmental support for pregnancy and child-rearing, and little access to help of any kind if financial disaster strikes. When a couple breaks up, most often it’s the man who leaves and the woman who is left with the child.

Even mothers with money have a hard time. The focus of news and gossip has been the fathers and potential fathers as they compete for money and power. The needs of mothers have not been foremost, never mind the needs of children.

But women and children without money, without men? That’s a disaster. Much of the misery in pre-pandemic America came from trying to raise families without enough money. If the father is not able to make enough money to help support the child, the man’s hurt pride is often enough to make him take off.  But even if the men stick around, it’s hard.

And it is to her children that a mother owes her first allegiance. Once you give birth to them, you are theirs for life, no matter what happens. You and the father, whatever your relationship – you were volunteers. Your children came into your hands completely at your mercy, through no fault of their own.

Because raising a child is such an enormous, costly, exhausting responsibility, people should be willing and ready to do it – at least as ready as you can be for this stranger who will remake your life. If a woman is not ready to take care of a child, either financially or emotionally, forcing her to bear one is a cruel and unusual punishment. Of course she most likely will love the child, but that is hardly the point.

To bear a child you can’t feed, can’t keep safe, whom you can’t be there for – that is a terrible kind of pain. Society has no right to make you bear it. In either sense.

Abortion is far from the worst thing we have to worry about, this year or any year. Actual, born, no-argument-human beings are getting killed every day, including infants. Yet somehow, the anti-abortion people don’t view war or domestic violence as a larger problem. They see abortion as the murder of innocents. Does a fetus lose its innocence once it is born?

So let’s try to retain some perspective on abortion. The alternative is for a woman to continue a pregnancy she does not want and bear a child for whom she is not ready. That child will be a burden on her life and her heart, no matter if she keeps it or gives it away. That child will begin life with a big count against it. And if society forces a woman to give birth no matter what the circumstances, will society then help her deal with the consequences? Let’s not kid ourselves, if you’ll forgive the pun. That woman and her child will be on their own.