Three things have led me to this hornet’s nest:
1. An article by a med student who plans to offer abortions some day
2. An ear wax self-removal scope
3. Alabama
(#4 is a curiosity to see if the topic can be touched without getting hate mail.)

For starters, here are some forces that push me around:

• I really don’t like to kill things in general. I border on vegetarian, though having married a Venezuelan with family on a meat farm, I’m a fair weather veggie.
• I like fixing rather than breaking things.
• I don’t like dead fetuses.
• I don’t like dead mothers.
• I’m saddened by unwanted or abused children, or trapped parents.
• I don’t like telling my wife, or women in general what to do with their uteruses, or otherwise.
• I greatly dislike feeling politically manipulated or shoved into binary thought.
• I greatly dislike seeing politicians manipulate the religious, and vice versa.

To me, all topics are grey. From my vantage point, the bar on who is killable has been moving progressively towards general kindness, if you think over centuries instead of years/decades. We don’t toss our purest into volcanoes any more. The market for medieval torture devices has dropped dramatically… not a single “Spanish boot” on Amazon! High noon duels have vanished. Pretty hard to lynch in the morning, attend church in the afternoon, and pray comfortably at bedtime nowadays, thankfully. Infanticide sends you to jail, and nobody seems to disagree. We struggle even to kill actual killers any longer.

So the bar keeps shifting, and now it’s intrauterine. We’re down to the cellular level where the rights of voiceless tenants and their variably intentional homeowners compete. Any newly landed Martian would have to be dazzled by our remarkable “humanity” that we’re even having these deliberations… until they turn on the news to see our shootings, our homeless, our addictions, our wars, our drone play.

Rather than choose a side I’ll make some stretch observations and predictions instead. 

• Abortion clinics will continue to get squeezed and other states will follow Alabama’s lead.
• Fewer and fewer med students will learn the trade, or even be offered the training. I can’t recall mention of elective abortion “how-to” on my OB rotation 20 years ago even. But I was a walking zombie, so I could have missed it.
• Since there’s a young guy suing his parents for having him without his consent (true story), I await the Alabaman who sues the state some day for the same.
• Women will continue to get pregnant, and those who can’t afford “EAB tourism” will be stuck with hard decisions. 
• The wealthy will still do what they want; or perhaps what their parents want.
• Adoption rates may increase.
• Child abuse rates may increase.
• But eventually abortion, like blood sugar monitoring and ear wax self removal, will become DIY.
• Home ultrasounds, or smartphone adapters, will be the new pregnancy test kit. They exist already, but still pricey like the first digital cameras.
• Plan B will be unveiled as … wait for it … higher dose birth control pills.
• Black market abortifacients will become more readily available.
• Low cost fiberoptic scopes, designed for A but working for B, will become the new hanger.
• The planet will keep spinning.
• And Pre-R won’t judge.

Call me a moderate?