Questions for pro-birth activists:

Do you believe a woman has agency over her own body and over what lives or dies inside of it? If not, who else should get to decide what lives or dies inside a woman’s body?

Do you believe that all humans naturally and always reproduce in ways that are responsible and will benefit their society and their families?

Should there be a punishment for those who do not?

Do you believe a woman should be forced to carry to term any life growing inside of her, regardless of the degree of deformity or decay of said life?

Do you believe that a fetus growing inside of a woman should be treated as an independent being even though it is completely dependent on the woman for its birthing? That is, should the woman have no say over the birth process of that being? What other rights should that being have? And at what stages?

Should the government dictate how many children a woman should give birth to or how many children a woman should not give birth to?

It’s easy and tempting to judge others from the outside based on their actions, without considering their environment or circumstance. My study of environmental chemical engineering gave me good instincts about cause and effect. I used this as a coach, always considering what might be causing an athlete to take an action, rather than just focusing on changing the action itself. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it did not. The best coaches don’t just change what you’re doing and they also know why you’re doing it, because they want to prevent it from happening again.

Getting to the root cause is also something that I learned in Engineering. In studying how failure happens, we learned that there are usually multiple contributing factors.

Perhaps this is why I cringe when I hear comments about how simple it is for someone to pull themselves out of poverty.