What is a Response Essay?

What is your response to the short essay I just posted on my new Pro-Life blog?

• the essay is as follows: Ethics and Abortion What the issue of abortion ultimately comes down to, is the triage that exists between a mother and her unwanted unborn-child. But there are serious ethical implications when we choose adults over the unborn. What that says is that we as a society only value the lives of those who are already functioning, contributing; members of the community, yet even in this we contradict ourselves when we protect the lives of born children under the law, and again when additional penalties are imposed for the murder of a pregnant woman verses one who isn’t pregnant. These contradictions exist because at our core we know better than to label someone as worthless because they’re too young to help out. We know better but in our culture we take convenience and “freedom” over ethical policy. This came to a head in January of 1973 when the Supreme Court ruled abortion legal. This was at the time of the second wave of Feminism in the United States. A time where I, personally, feel that the Feminist movement had lost sight of what it meant in the first place. The social contract theory says that Absolute Freedom cannot exist in a developed societal structure. We give up a certain amount of freedom to a government to protect us but that government is supposed to protect Everyone under its leadership. For this reason the general rule is that the freedoms you give up are your freedoms to harm others. The point was to grant us (women) Equal rights, to men. But because the letter of the Law, cannot change the biological fact that women are the child-bearing half of the human species without going against the social contract with abortion. (Killing the unborn obviously qualifies as harm), Roe V Wade just ignored it altogether. Which, this is something I find Hilarious because if John Locke hadn’t thought of Social Contract theory, modern representative government wouldn’t exist. Now one might argue that despite all this no one has the moral responsibility to provide life support for another living creature. This… is one of my favorite and least favorite arguments because it essentially throws everything above out the window. We either function together, or act of our own selfish convenience. We ether value the next generation, or we don’t. When we try to find a middle ground that doesn’t hinge on responsibility we end up contradicting ourselves somewhere. We as a society need to start with the mothers, educating girls about the consequences of sex and it’s possible outcomes, about all methods of birth-control, how effective they actually are and how to use them, then we need to make that birth-control easy to obtain and we need to support those women for whom it fails. Once we do these things the rate of abortion will decrease substantially and the necessary shift in the public’s mindset can occur. It’s not about choosing the woman over the child or the child over the woman, it’s about valuing and protecting both to build a better future.

• Answer:

  "What that says is that we as a society only value the lives of those who are already functioning, contributing; members of the community" Very well put and completely correct. With that in mind, could you please leave us now?