Pro-Choice, Christian, and a Dad

I think Amy Sullivan is confused:

You’re pro-choice. Does that interfere with being an evangelical? Well, I don’t like the [pro-choice] label. I guess the reason I wrote about abortion the way I did in the book is because I have serious moral concerns about abortion, but I don’t believe that it should be illegal. And that puts me in the vast majority of Americans. But unfortunately, there’s no label for us.

Excuse me but I’m a Methodist and I’m proud to say I’m pro-choice. Amanda Marcotte almost captures what I’d like to say to Amy:

Yes, there is. If you think abortion and other forms of contraceptive birth control should be legal—i.e. that women should have the legal right to decide when they have children—you are pro-choice. Even if you still reserve the right to judge them for it. This entire interview with Amy Sullivan, like all her talk on getting the evangelical vote, makes me tired. She appears to have a definition problem, basically, characterizing evangelicals as if they are all Bible-believing Christians, when most self-identified evangelicals are patriarchy proponents with a thin veneer of Christianity over everything as a moral justification.

This is a simple issue – even if the anti-choice crowd tries to obscure it. I don’t want the government involved in the decisions that women such as my 20-year daughter might have to make. But there’s a difference between myself v. either Amanda or Amy. I’m a guy so I’ll never have to face the decision that some single women who happen to become pregnant have to make.

I have no idea whether my daughter is sexually active or not but if she is, she has yet to become pregnant. If she did and her boyfriend was just a jerk as to abandon her – I’d hope she’d ask her dad for advice. But advice is all I’d have the right to give her. And the advice would start with this simple fact – it is her choice not my choice or the choice of some yahoo who’d dare try to use government coercion on what may be the most difficult choice of her life. The second thing I’d tell her is that if she did decide to make me a grandfather, I’d financially support mother and child. But if she decided to terminate the pregnancy, I’d tell her to get a good doctor. And if some yahoo tries to judge her in a negative way – that yahoo would have to deal with me telling the idiot to leave my daughter alone.