Today I am thankful for the ability to see both sides of an issue. I’m fortunate to have people in my life that can agree or disagree with me and love me regardless of our personal opinions and convictions. I’m glad that I posses the ability to look and think beyond news headlines and raging activists and not allow them to be a distraction.

Over the last month I have scrolled through the recent controversial topic, bit my tongue for a while and I just have to comment on it, because this was never an issue in and of itself. It’s not an issue because of religion, nor is it good people against bad people. It became an issue because we are not the smartest society that ever lived, and regardless of whatever laws pass or don’t pass going forward, the roots of this problem aren’t going away until we make them go away.

There are a lot of people who disagree with the idea of playing God and deciding whether a life in a womb should be terminated at all, especially not based on situational circumstances. There’s also the ‘unless it’s necessary, it’s unnecessary’ mindset, and those truly logical pro lifers who are also anti-fertility treatment, radical supporters of adoption and anti-death penalty, which is a great place to be in my opinion.

My question is, why are we so stupid and incapable of addressing the problems that caused this epidemic in the first place? (i.e. a broken and corrupt healthcare system, economic inequality, limited access to contraception, inadequate sex education, lack of responsibility, lack of fertility awareness, bad parenting, uninvolved parenting, poverty, violent misogyny that often leads to the r word…

Why can’t we go upstream on any of these individual issues and minimize requests for the horrible procedure in the first place?

I know why – because we’re lazy, self absorbed and don’t actually want to deal with any of it.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a single, perfect solution, and no matter how passionate we are about shouting our opinions from either side, fixating on the yes or the no without putting any logical thought into finding a functional solution is just adding fuel to the fire. This is a serious, life or death issue, but it isn’t black or white and if we honestly believe that putting laws in place that either say we’re allowed to do this or we’re not allowed to do this is going to fix the deep roots of the problem, we’re part of the problem.