What I Believe About Abortion

A note before we begin: Those who have had difficulty with fertility or complications during pregnancy should know that I discuss these realities below. I hope to do so without compounding any grief. I also discuss abortion from the perspective of someone who was once firmly pro-life and has shifted to a more progressive, pro-choice stance.

A family member has asked me this question twice now:

"How have your views on abortion changed since becoming an atheist?"

Both times, I haven't been able to articulate my answer to my own satisfaction. The question is simple enough. My position is not. So rather than fumble through it again at a family gathering, I want to try to lay it out here as honestly and carefully as I can.

What I Used to Believe

I was raised to believe that life is sacred. Not metaphorically. Not in the way someone might say a sunset is sacred or a piece of music is sacred. I mean cosmically, eternally sacred.

In LDS (Mormon) theology, each human being is a fleshly tabernacle designed to house a spirit son or daughter of our Heavenly Father. Before we were born, we existed as spirits waiting for the opportunity to receive a body, to experience mortality, to prove ourselves worthy of returning to God's presence.

To destroy that tabernacle — even in embryo — was to deny one of those spirit children the chance at life. The chance at a body. The chance at the test.

With that framework, protecting unborn life wasn't just a moral preference. It was a cosmic obligation. I was firmly, unquestionably pro-life.

And I still understand, to a significant degree, why religious people feel the way they do about abortion. When you believe that an eternal soul is waiting for that body, the stakes feel infinite.

What Changes When the Framework Falls Away

Leaving behind your religious framework allows you to reconceptualize your view on human life.

When you take away the concepts of eternal life, spirit children needing bodies, and a god who gives mandates on how our bodies are to be used, you begin to understand human life differently. It becomes something fleeting, fragile, and far less binary than the pro-life/pro-choice divide suggests.

I should say clearly: being pro-choice is not carte blanche to terminate a pregnancy at any point for any reason. I think the closer a developing life comes to the point of birth, the more challenging the justification becomes. This is not an all-or-nothing position. It is a position that tries to hold multiple truths at the same time.

The Fragility We Don't Talk About

I want to start with something I think most people understand but rarely factor into this conversation: pregnancy is an extraordinarily fickle process.

Estimates suggest that anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, and the actual number — including pregnancies that end before a woman even knows she's pregnant — may be significantly higher. The human body terminates pregnancies naturally, regularly, for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone's choices.

This is not anyone's fault. It is not the result of some moral failing. It is biology.

And I have to pause here to acknowledge the pain this reality carries for those who desperately want children but, for any number of reasons, have been unable to have them. I recognize the anguish that some undoubtedly feel toward people who would choose to end a pregnancy when they themselves would give anything to sustain one. If there were a way to easily transition that life from one womb to another, what a miracle that would be.

But acknowledging that pain doesn't change the reality: pregnancy is not a guaranteed or simple process. And the conversation about abortion has to account for that fragility.

The Principles I Built From

When I lost my religious framework, I had to rebuild my moral reasoning from the ground up. I wrote a personal manifesto. I wrote a set of core beliefs I've been refining since I left the church. Several of those beliefs sit at the center of how I now think about abortion.

Human autonomy. The right of each individual to pursue a life according to the dictates of their own conscience is something I consider sacred. And this is one of the few things I still use that word for. Your body is yours. Your choices about that body are yours.

Consent. Nobody has the right to impose on you something you are unwilling to bear. Whether that is a religious belief, a conversation, a physical act, or anything that passes between two or more people. If it's done without consent, it devalues someone's right to their own body and experience.

The full picture matters. When it comes to abortion, there is more to consider than the life of the potential infant. There is the life of the mother. The life the child would actually have. The resources available. The circumstances. Society at large. Reducing the entire conversation to one variable — the fetus — is to ignore everything else that makes a human life worth living.

Sex is more than procreation. A sexual relationship, even a casual one, serves more than the act of making children. Sex can be playful. Sex can be comforting. Sex can be a way for two people to bond. Sex can be a way to feel something when everything else feels hollow. And yes, sex can be the means by which new life begins. But it is not only that. And to treat it as if it is, to say that every sexual act carries an obligation to carry a resulting pregnancy to term, is to reduce human intimacy to a single function.

What My Former Self Would Say

My pro-life self would have said the choice was made when the couple decided to have sex. That inherent in the act was the understanding that it could result in a life being started. When two people decide to engage in sexual intercourse, they are choosing the potential consequence.

I understand that argument. I held and used it for a long time.

But my current self sees it differently.

Consent doesn't end at the act. Part of consent — for both partners — includes consent to what comes after. Consent to having a life carried to term. Consent to becoming a parent. These are not decisions that get locked in the minutes two people are intimate with each other.

Ultimately, the woman has the final say, because it is her body that must sustain that life for nine months and, more often than not, her life that will be most fundamentally altered by the child's arrival. Consent carries beyond the bedroom into everything that follows. People have the right to choose whether to become parents. Or, in many cases, whether to expand their family.

We live in a remarkable age where birth control options are numerous and largely safe. But even the most vigilant may find themselves facing an unplanned pregnancy. When that happens, the question isn't whether a choice was already made. The question is what choice exists now.

When You Remove the Eternal Stakes

When you're divorced from a religious worldview, there is no longer an eternal implication in choosing to end a pregnancy. There is no spirit child being denied its body. There is no cosmic test being cut short.

What you're doing is stopping a biological process. A process that, as I mentioned, terminates naturally in a significant percentage of cases without anyone calling it murder.

That doesn't make the decision trivial. It doesn't mean it should be made carelessly. But it does remove the infinite weight that religion places on it. And without that infinite weight, you can think about it more clearly.

What We Risk When We Criminalize

There are practical consequences to making abortion illegal that deserve serious consideration.

The criminalization of tragedy. One of the risks of outlawing abortion is what could happen to women who are accused of ending a pregnancy intentionally. While this might be true in some cases, the vast majority of pregnancy losses are natural. Creating a legal framework where a grieving mother could face criminal investigation for a miscarriage is not protecting life. It's compounding suffering.

The chilling effect on medicine. While roughly 93% of abortions occur within the first trimester, removing the possibility of later-term procedures puts women at risk. There are situations where continuing a pregnancy threatens the life of the mother. When doctors fear prosecution, they hesitate. And that hesitation can cost lives. Lives that are already here, already conscious, already loved.

To make something that humans have engaged in for millennia illegal doesn't eliminate it. It drives it underground and makes it far less safe than it would be in a regulated medical environment.

The Lives We Already Value Differently

I know this next point will be uncomfortable for some. It was uncomfortable in my own head. But I think it's honest.

While most people want to say that every human life has equal intrinsic value, the reality is that we already value some lives more than others. This isn't a moral failing. It's basic human wiring.

The lives of our families, friends, and communities matter more to us than the lives of strangers we'll never meet on the other side of the world. That's not cruelty. That's biology. Preserve the tribe. Take care of your own.

This doesn't mean anyone has less of a right to dignity, respect, and basic decency. It means that when we talk about the value of a potential life — one that has not yet been born, has not yet drawn breath, has not yet formed relationships or memories — we should be honest about where that life falls on the spectrum of our actual concern.

An embryo is not a child. Nor is a fetus. We have special words for that development because it has the potential to become a human life. But potential and actuality are not the same thing.

More Than Just Existence

More than 80% of abortions are performed on women who would otherwise become single mothers.

I have to preface what comes next by saying that single mothers do tremendous, often heroic work every day. They make incredible sacrifices for their children, and I do not mean to diminish that in any way. What I want to acknowledge is a fundamental reality.

Studies have consistently demonstrated that children raised in stable, two-parent households generally experience better outcomes including higher academic performance, better emotional health, and increased financial stability. There are many factors that contribute to healthy childhood development, but at a minimum, a two-parent household has more resources at its disposal than a single-parent one.

So when we talk about protecting life, we should also talk about what kind of life we're protecting. Not just its existence, but its quality. Not just whether a child is born, but what that child's world will look like.

My personal conviction is this: it is better to end an embryonic life than to bring a child into an environment that will set them up for a lifetime of hardship and uncertainty. That is not a callous statement. It is, I believe, a compassionate one.

Where I've Landed

I didn't arrive at this position easily. I carried the pro-life framework for decades. It was woven into my identity, my faith, my understanding of what it meant to be a good person. Letting go of it meant letting go of certainty. And certainty, as I've written about before, is one of the hardest things to lose.

But I've come to believe that the pro-life position, at least as I was taught it, cares more about life beginning than about life being lived. It fights for the unborn with a ferocity that often disappears the moment the child arrives. It demands that women carry pregnancies to term but offers little structural support for what comes after. It frames the conversation entirely around the fetus while ignoring the mother, the family, the circumstances, the resources, the future.

That's not valuing life. That's valuing birth.

I believe in valuing the whole picture. The autonomy of the woman. The consent that extends beyond a single act. The quality of the life that would follow. The medical realities that make rigid laws dangerous. The honesty to admit that we already value lives differently and that an embryo is not the same as a child.

I believe that a society that trusts women to make these decisions — in consultation with their partners, their doctors, and their own conscience — is a society that actually respects human life. Not in the abstract, cosmic, spirit-children-need-bodies way I was raised with. But in the real, tangible, what kind of world are we actually building way.

This isn't a comfortable position. It doesn't fit on a bumper sticker. It requires holding multiple truths at once and sitting with the weight of none of them being simple.

But I'd rather carry that weight honestly than hand it off to a theology I no longer believe or a government I don't trust to make medical decisions for half the population.

The question was: how have my views on abortion changed?

They changed the same way everything else did. I stopped accepting someone else's framework and started building my own. And the one I built has more room for nuance, for compassion, for autonomy, and for the uncomfortable truth that valuing life means more than just insisting it begins.