Yesterday I received a letter from a visitor to my
website, voteutah.us, asking the following:
"I see that you are running for Senate. I would like to
know your stand on the following issues:
1. Abortion
2. Euthanasia
3. Embryonic Stem Cell Research
4. Same sex marriage
5. Human Cloning"
My answer follows: I appreciate your asking and
investigating my take on these matters of great importance. I am happy to
attempt to address them.
Abortion. I believe that many people place this as their
central issue in voting, I think because they view it as the destruction of a
soul, presumably immortal. That is actually the position I took in a college
speech class, several decades ago. I had graduated 12 years of Catholic school,
with some very strict nuns.
Since then, I've grown physically and spiritually, read
countless articles on the topic, known a number of women who had an abortion
(probably many more than actually talked about it to me), and thought about the
subject from many points of view.
First, I do think many people take the topic too
lightly, whether one believes in an immortal soul or not. Clearly, if a person
believes, for whatever reason, that abortion is the taking of innocent human
life, I can understand their abhorrence of such an act. Not to stand up for
that belief would be a disregard of one's own morality.
Of course, there can be an infinite spread of further
complicating issues. Is the mother's life endangered, does the fetus have
serious medical problems that will cause a life of misery or a very short life
anyway, and the list goes on and on.
That said, the view that a fertilized egg has a soul,
mortal or otherwise, is ultimately a personal, generally religious one. At the
same time, even if there is no soul, as many believe, this is not something
many women I've known take lightly. It is a major, life-changing event, either
way.
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