The position of my Church is clear, as it has been since the Didache (1st century), through the Middle Ages, and down to today. Abortion is wrong and is a sin. While it won't win me many friends in this thread, I feel it prudent here to quote St. Pisentios, bishop of Qift in the 7th century, who in the first of his two extant letters warned us in plain language: "Any woman who aborts what she carries in her womb of the incomplete foetus the Lord shall throw her into the depth of the pit of Hades."
Clear enough, no? But for those who will not accept the council of the Church, though it is the Body of Christ and the Israel of God and the Pillar and Ground of Truth, perhaps you will listen to my story. I know it is 'anecdata', and can be dismissed just as easily, but it is from this that I formed my own view on this matter long before becoming Orthodox (rather, since I was born).
You see, I'm exactly the kind of person who is used as a scare tactic for younger or older possible parents, to make the point that abortion should be legal: I have a physical disability. I've always had it, I always will have it (there's no cure/surgery to fix it), it significantly impacts my life, etc., and I'm sure it has caused much stress on my family over the years (I'm 40; thanks be to God, it is not predicted to shorten a person's life span by much, though a lot of that of course depends on other factors, just as it would for able-bodied people).
So okay then. Knowing that my very existence would be a real challenge to ______ (my parents' happiness, their marriage, family cohesiveness more generally...whatever), and knowing in advance that if I was going to have any life it was going to be a very hard one (NB: starting off at 1 lb, 6 oz as I did is quite bad for the baby's prognosis even today, let alone in 1982, when I was born), the doctors who saw my mother through my premature birth very sensibly and humanely, with science on their side and no doubt the most compassionate of intentions (I know tone is hard to read online, but I am being completely serious here), told her that in their educated opinions it would be best if I were disconnected from the life-saving machines that I was hooked up to in the neonatal ICU, as I was almost guaranteed not to be able to survive on my own, so keeping me alive artificially was in some sense delaying the inevitable and just prolonging the pain and misery my family was experiencing in dealing with my traumatic entrance into the world.
My mother, who had been a committed Christian since her teens even as the rest of her family was then and is still now atheistic/agnostic, told them to keep me on the machines anyway, and if I was to live I would live long enough to get off of them, and then we'd see. When with time she was proven exactly right, and I did live without the machines and the little igloo thing they put neonatal ICU babies in, the doctors told her that it would be best for me if I could be placed in a state-run facility rather than taken home to raised by my parents (who had their own problems, and anyway already had a perfectly healthy child, my older brother). As my mother told it to me, every year around my birthday, they said something like "he'll never be able to adapt to society." I suppose the degree to which I've adapted to society can be questioned, but she did not listen to them in this, either. I was born in early September and didn't get to celebrate my first Christmas at home until I was over one year old, but I did eventually have that pleasure. They took me home and raised me as well as they could (though they'd divorce when I was three), and have since gone on to their rest, my mother 25 years ago and my father only about two and a half years ago. May God rest them in the paradise of joy, if it be according to His good will.
My point in typing all this out about my background (which I don't really like to share online to begin with, but I think is important to establish when this topic comes up) is to ask you all what I sincerely hope will be a rhetorical question, since I respect the OP's request that we try not to attack each other over this issue:
If my story were your story, how do you think you would feel about abortion?
To me it makes sense to say that if women's decisions regarding their own bodies ought to have pride of place in discussion of this issue (which is very sensible; they are the ones with all the wombs, after all), then there ought to also be a space, however small it may be, for people like me to also have our say, even as we are the boogiemen of pregnancy; the ones who are a priori not wanted (though thanks be to God my mother obviously wanted me!); the ones who are after all used in these rhetorical fights by people on all sides, with the unspoken assumption that we cannot or ought not have a voice in this, even though we are marshalled as evidence for the necessity of abortion, because what if your child turned out to be like me?
I am a person too. Even if I scare everyone and inspire a million abortions, I am still a person. No rhetoric on any side can deny me what God has given me. I was born with it just like all of you.
