Sandy Dilley and Stacie Stone come on to discuss the pro-life/pro-choice debate.  This is one of the better episodes this season.

Hopefully it’s clear after this episode that the biggest hurdle for the pro-choice movement is the fact that it’s misrepresented only as an exception – an exception that must belong to a preceding rule; the pro-choice stance is the only one of ethical substance.  The idea of “choice” as it’s presented as exception is illusory at best and only after some transgression or event that has limited, prevented, or denied choice.  The moral stance of the pro-life argument is that there is no choice but only exceptions that prove the rule, as it were – prove the moral righteousness of the only choice – between right and wrong.  This limits the dilemma and when an exception is presented as choice, it is not only shown that this is wrong but that this is in fact known to only be wrong and so your exception, your “choice” is only the logical excess of the moral stance – this leaves pro-choice enveloped within the pro-life argument.  We’re left with a structuralized argument that consumes the other because of the presumption that it cannot exist outside of it.  To truly break the cycle, pro-choice needs to be regarded as so many have proven and shown it to be: a responsible stance that allows for moral agency to intervene but is not necessary to be considered inherently moral – i.e. a woman’s right to make decisions over her own body: an inherent, self-evident right.  The right to choose is the primordial argument, not the other way around.  A person’s right to choose, let alone a woman’s, resides in the kernel of freedom; denying a woman’s right to choose gives rise to denying a woman as true victim – which is an awful added insult to coincide with the primary transgression that got her there without which she couldn’t even begin to consider a “choice”.

This is the last episode of the podcast.  Thank you everyone for listening and thanks to those for having come on.

-Andy