I highly recommend the book Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. It’s been published with a couple different subtitles–mine has “Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection.” It’s a cross-species, cross-cultural look at the pressures, evolutionary and otherwise, brought to bear on mothering. She doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable issues–like, that infanticide is still rather too (for western tastes) widely practiced in parts of the developing world.

*sigh*

The Bible, you know, doesn’t bother mentioning, except positively, the actual route women took in ancient times for unwanted births. Remember Moses? He was abandoned. Think about it for a minute. Was abandonment ever, uh, disallowed?

The passage in the D&C, which Steve wondered about, is 59:6, Thou shalt not . . . not kill, nor do anything like unto it.”

Elder Packer used the concept when discussing abortion. I, being the language freak I am, tend to see the point of using the words as to imply that while abortion is not necessarily death as we have conventionally understood it, it is similar to killing.

As the pro-life movement, especially the Catholics, has come to see conception as the moment of God’s creation of life, abortion has come to be seen as the taking of innocent life.

Elder Nelson’s use of the metaphor of war against the defenseless begins to suggest that some LDS may believe that the spirit enters the body at the moment of conception.

But LDS theology of pre-mortal life, conception, birth, life, death, resurrection, and eternal life does not seem to me to allow us to say that abortion is any more than like unto killing. It is therefore not the same as killing.

This, however, does not mean that the Lord has not prohibited its broad and general practice.

None of this helps with the idea that when building a state/society, people have the responsibility to themselves to craft laws and regulations that provide an environment in which life can flourish and the good can be pursued. Should the people, who make up a state, intervene on behalf of the defenseless unborn? If so, what form would the intervention take? How do idealism and pragmatism converge so as to build a hopeful and happy society? It must also be forcefully stated that defenseless women on whom pregnancy has been forced by biological necessity or anything else that denies choice must be a profound part of this argument. Conventional views about pregnancy as punishment for sin no longer belong in the world of moral thinking this very modern debate has created.

We have not thought hard enough and well enough to know the answers to the questions these evolving views of life, choice, responsibility, and death have raised. But the way we answer questions like these will tell us a lot about what we think a good life is.

I, too, am dismayed at the number and vehemence of the men commenting on this thread. I also agree with a comment by greenfrog (way up there–I mostly just skimmed the last half or more of the comments) that JNS is kind of playing by the rules of the anti-abortion side by focusing on the morality of abortion. The problem with this approach is that no one, NO ONE, believes that abortion is good. Even in the absence of religion-based or other morality, abortion is bad because it is inefficient and wasteful of maternal resources. Women who choose abortion don’t do so because they don’t value life; they do it because they see it as their best alternative under the circumstances. That is why punitive approaches to reducing abortion rates don’t work–they don’t address the desperation.

As Jessawhy pointed out when she quoted Bill Clinton, pro-choicers want to reduce abortions too. They just want to do it using methods that WORK: comprehensive and age-appropriate sex education, low- or no-cost access to effective birth control, etc. All that aside, the most effective way to reduce abortion rates in this country is to heal our economy.