Choice

Rights and life

A Good Reed Review Commentary & Pubs , , , , ,

By Ande Jacobson

Several months ago as Dobbs was heating up, a dear, pro-life friend asked me if I considered a fetus a life. My knee jerk reaction was absolutely not. I kept thinking about my answer, and after a good night’s sleep realized that my friend had asked the wrong question. She didn’t really want to know if I considered a fetus a life. Of course it’s living tissue. What my friend was really asking was whether I believed that a fetus was a person. There my answer is still unequivocally, no. Clinically, it really shouldn’t be considered a person until it is born, or as Roe v. Wade decided almost 50 years ago, at least until the point when it is viable outside of its host/mother’s body. Before that point, options to terminate a pregnancy if so desired should remain legal, safe, and available to all. Continue reading →

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It’s strange in my land

A Good Reed Review Commentary & Pubs , , ,

By Ande Jacobson

Sometimes I don’t recognize the country I thought I knew. The news is filled with terrifying reports on all kinds of things as the world grapples with the ongoing struggle between authoritarianism and democracy as various individual rights are being restricted in ways that were incomprehensible just a few years ago. The struggle is exacerbated by the huge wealth disparity in the U.S. between a small number of ultra-wealthy individuals and a large number of regular people just trying to live their lives. The world is far more connected now that it was 50 or 60 years ago. Since the widespread use of the internet, information that used to have daily, weekly, or even monthly cycles now flows continuously with 24/7 access to current information, some of which is factual, and some of which is entirely fictional. The sorting is left to the interested reader or viewer, and it can be exhausting sometimes. Continue reading →

Choice is important

A Good Reed Review Commentary & Pubs , ,

By Ande Jacobson

The choices we make are important. We each make choices about all kinds of things every day. Some are small things such as what to eat for breakfast. Some have longer range effects such as deciding on a career path or whether to accept a particular job offer. Others are even more life changing such as choosing if or when to have a child, or more immediately, whether to carry a given pregnancy to term based on one’s own circumstances. All are personal choices, yet that last one is currently under its greatest threat since the passage of Roe v. Wade. Continue reading →

A World With Choice Reversed

A Good Reed Review fiction ,

By Ande Jacobson

Alex was musing over something that had long bothered her about humankind. Humans were the only species that had the capacity to use external intervention to voluntarily control or even stop their population growth and reach a steady state either by preventing a pregnancy from happening if it was the wrong time, or freely choosing whether to take a pregnancy to term or terminate an unwanted one. Unfortunately they kept getting bogged down with in-fighting surrounding forcing people to complete pregnancies whether they wanted to or not based on religious convictions or control issues. A few years earlier, she had read a fascinating work of fiction where a mad scientist genetically engineered a virus that over the course of a single week infected every human in the world, and as a result randomly sterilized a third of the human population. He had engineered the virus to modify and become a part of the human genome so it was inheritable, but the trait only turned on about a third of the time permanently reducing the human population over subsequent generations to something more sustainable. Continue reading →