Don't call it that.

Every semester or so the Pro-Life group on campus sets up a couple of boards in a public spot. They scrawl a question about abortion across the tops and leave them there, dangling markers, for a few days. Those boards fill up fast. There's lots of emotion running hot around the topic; everyone has something to say (in capital letters with multiple exclamation marks) and no one, no one attempts to take the middle ground. There is no middle ground. The most intermediate opinion would look like, "I don't much like it but I'm not going to tell you what to do." That shunts our moderate voice into the Pro-Choice camp. Once you get there it's not about babies anymore, it's about the fundamental right of each individual to do as they see fit within the law. The result is a sweltering clash of ideals in point form as some defend life while others defend freedom. It's a difficult debate. The pro-lifers snarl about freedom to live and the pro-choicers rasp back about freedom to choose a way of life. Those boards don't make anyone happy.

I like them, in an unhappy way. They get me thinking about the ranking of values and conflicting ideals. It's rash to say one side is flat out wrong. Who's going to argue that life isn't worth protecting? Obviously it is. Mine is, anyway. Likely anyone who's breathing and sentient is going to claim the same status. Problem solved, we're all pro-life! Hold on, though. Who's going to say that an individual's way of life should be out of their control? Or that it's good to force your values on another? Clearly both stances have powerful ideas backing them. The advocates of both pro-life and pro-choice are passionately devoted to their perspectives, and why wouldn't they be? Both sets of values appear to be sound, being predicated on rights that are desirable and necessary for civility and freedom. Both the right to live and the right to choose are wrapped around the guts of every North American. Try to wrench them away and we all start screaming.

Then again, no one would claim that both camps are right. The conclusions each espouse are mutually exclusive. How can that be when the opposing arsenals are universally recognized rights that normally go hand in hand? Something somewhere is off.

Until a couple years ago, I had never heard the term "Pro-Choice." I called it "Pro-Abortion." It's not the prettiest name, and it doesn't have the reassuring glow of humane responsibility that bathes "Pro-Life". People who are pro-abortion can't call themselves that or they'll be outglimmered by their foes from the beginning. If they wanted to set themselves up exactly opposite to pro-life, they could go with "anti-life" or "pro-death," but as replacements for "pro-abortion" those are hardly remedial. "Pro-choice," now, rings sweet and true, belling forth strains of freedom, liberty, and equality. This must be why it was adopted to describe one who supports the legalization and availability of abortion: it has such a fine sheen to it. But maybe . . . maybe it isn't the most accurate of names. Maybe choice is not what pro-choice supports.

If we assume that "choice" refers to the species of decision that lends life to liberty, then the anatomy of choice becomes important. Choice exists where there are three things:

1. A group of options (no fewer than two).
2. An organism capable of recognizing the presence of options.
3. Differing outcomes with the selection of each option.

The first two are self evident enough. No options means nothing to choose between. No awareness of the options means no ability to alter self direction, which means no freedom, which means no choice. The last piece, what can be called "unique consequence," is the component most often mislabeled or misplaced in descriptions of choice. Is is far more than an incidental byproduct, more than something that comes trailing in after the choice has been made. Choice cannot exist without it. No difference between outcomes means the decision made by the organism never mattered, and power to act and direct becomes strictly illusive. Our much vaunted rights of freedom rely heavily on the third and final appendage of choice. Consequence grants us the inalienable right to choose a way of life and a method of happiness when it brings force to the current decision and light to future decisions. Every choice downstream is marked by the third appendage. If the organism is paying any attention, future clusters of options will be flanked by notes in the margins, written there by experience. Consequence, then, develops and reinforces the power to choose by expanding the choice maker's ability to recognize and comprehend the significance of future options.

Pro-choice thought holds that abortion protects choice by creating another option. The idea is that pregnant women are mature, functional adults (or something like it) with the responsibility of directing and managing their own lives. As such they should not be forced to carry to term a child they do not want. To expect this of them is to rob them of an inalienable freedom, to hobble their pursuit of happiness. These women and their partners have a right to choose what they will do with the life they have, and abortion shores up that right.

Abortion as the guardian of choice is an uneasy fit. Does it really provide another option? Childlessness is an option that may be realized in other ways. Giving the child away is one. Avoiding pregnancy is another. If the couple had no choice but to become pregnant, then certainly abortion supports choice. Disregarding pregnancies from rape (which are tragic exceptions and not the rule), such a circumstance seems overwhelmingly unlikely. More probably, our mature, functional adults made choices leading to pregnancy. Promoting and protecting choice is no longer the battle; a pregnant couple is in the post-choice arena, in which they become acquainted with the vital third appendage that gives their choices power.

If anything, abortion hinders choice. It creates an artificial situation in which people can partially disable the third appendage of their choices. Consequence no longer works for them and they are left to choose blindly, to sort among options they will never fully understand or recognize. If we acknowledge that pregnancy and parenthood are natural outcomes of both intra- and extra-marital sexual relations, then pro-life philosophy creates conditions that encourage and celebrate choice. Pro-choice does not.

We came here by musing over the jangle of apparently conflicting rights which should be mutually supportive. In the end, we had a Rose Problem: a flower named "phug" is never going to smell quite right because the name is all wrong. The debate between pro-life and pro-choice will always be cloudy because at least one of those names has been wrongfully appropriated to support a cause it does not describe. Pro-life is also pro-choice. What we have called pro-choice needs another name. Pro-abortion still works. I suppose anti-life and pro-death are out of the question, but there are other adequately apt candidates: pro-convenience, pro-self, and anti-consequence. Anti-choice. True, none of them have the gorgeous sheen of "pro-choice," but names so beautiful have never fitted properly over abortion. Perhaps this uncomfortable phenomenon merits even more attention than the search for a name that will sound like a bell . . .