I am passionately pro-choice, but not because I think the anti-choice advocates are all liars and fools. There are people on both sides of this issue that think the answer is obvious, and can be found by consulting common sense and/or scientific fact. For several years, I taught a course on abortion that was designed to destroy this self-confidence, by showing how confusing this topic is when you think clearly about it. That is the strongest argument for why this is really a religious question, and why the state has no business making this decision for anyone else. My uncertainty does not weaken my commitment to the pro-choice position. On the contrary, it is because the issues can’t be easily resolved either way that having an abortion must remain a matter of personal choice: Not because the question is simple but because it is too complicated for anyone to be sure what the right answer is.

This series of linked essays is based on the texts from my abortion course, and the discussions we had in class. My goal is to enable the reader to experience first hand just how difficult these questions are. At the end of that course, most of my students concluded that they were anti-abortion and pro-choice. It is my hope that paraphrasing our class discussions will help foster a level of tolerance which is regrettably lacking in the current public debates on this topic.

https://teedrockwell.medium.com/abortion-involves-all-the-unanswerable-questions-in-philosophy-e7eb985102f2?fs=e&s=cl