Blogging for Choice: Why I am pro-choice

I am pro-choice -- by which I mean that I consider it immoral for the government to interfere with a person's reproductive decisions -- because I consider a person's self-ownership to be fundamental. That is to say, I consider my body to be under my control. I likewise consider other people's bodies to be under their control. The only legitimate limit on this self-ownership begins when an individual's decision regarding his or her own body has a non-trivial chance of negatively affecting another person more than limit affects the individual.

Additionally, I am not an essentialist. I do not consider a human blastocyst to be the moral equivalent of a human infant. In fact, I consider it morally incorrect to assert this equivalence. The only justification for asserting such a moral equivalence is either essentialism or a ridiculously reductionist definition of "person." This seems so blindingly obvious to me that I am surprised that the opinion is not universally understood.