Lady Victoria Eclectic Pagan's blog: "Things That Make You Go Hmmmm..."

Questions of life and death inevitably bring up the issue of abortion. For some women, a commitment to serve the life-force might make an abortion impossible. For others, an abortion might be the highly ethical choice not to bring forth a child that cannot, for whatever reason, be wholeheartedly loved and cared for. For a child is given life not just by its physical birth, but through relationships with lovings, caring human beings. If those relationships cannot be assured, then the newborn is given only half a life, a precarious, starved existence.

But abortion is not truly an issue of right-to-life versus right-to-choice.  To maintain the right of every egg and sperm to reproduce blindly is like maintaining the right of every cockroach and flea to populate the world endlessly. The question at stake is actually the right-to-coerce.  Only our assumption that some people have the right to exercise power-over others allows us even to consider taking the choice away from the woman whose self and body and future at stake.

For human right to be rich, joyful, loving, it must be the freely given gift of the Mother - through the human mother.  To bear new life is a heavy responsibility, requiring a deep commitment, that no one can force on another. To coerce a woman by force, or fear, or guilt, or law, or economic pressure to bear an unwanted child is immoral. It denies her right to exercise her own sacred will and conscience, robs her of her humanity, and dishonors the Goddess manifest in her being.  It is the responsibility of an ethical society not to force every fetus conceived to be brought to term, but to provide support and resources so that every child born can be fed and sheltered, loved, nurtured, and protected.

Human communities must limit their numbers and their lifestyles to what the land can support without straining resources or displacing other species.

We can act freely when we recognize that we are neither powerless or omnipotent; that our active will, strong as it may be, is tempered by the activity of other wills, that our needs and desires must be balanced with those of others.