This past week I was working on a couple assignments when I took a break to scroll through my newsfeed. The same old, same old was happening - someone got engaged, someone was pissed off about something, some weird headline about Trump popped up, and then an article that caught my eye, “I Am 100% Pro-Life And Proud Of It." This article was very well written and made excellent points. My favorite thing of all was that the author, Beth Mattingly, never tried to convince pro-choicers that we are wrong. She never said her opinion was better or that she was right, she was simply stating her beliefs and I commend her for that.

However, as a woman who strongly supports choice, I felt compelled to respond with my arguments for why I chose to be pro-choice. Like Beth, I was once believed the opposite. I used to be pro-life. I thought it was wrong for a pregnancy to be terminated. Anyone who knows me knows that I am very flexible debate, I love to hear the opponent’s side and sometimes (if the arguments are strong enough) I even change my position. This was exactly what happened to me when I became pro-choice. I was having a discussion with a friend when she said to me, “You’re not pro-life, you’re simply pro-birth. When that unborn child gets here, you’re opposed to the utilization of food stamps and welfare to support it and you’re certainly not going to take care of the unwanted baby.”

And just like that, I became pro-choice. Ever since I have strongly advocated for enabling a woman to make her own choice. Today, I’d like to share all the reasons I’m pro-choice.

Not everyone is a Christian.

I get a lot of hate when I say I’m a pro-choice Christian, but it’s true. Not everyone is a Christian. It’s not right for a follower of God to take away someone else’s choice based on what YOU believe in. If you are truly passionate about your religion and believe in what the Bible preaches, you should know that God will (if he deems abortion unacceptable) take care of it on judgement day. It’s not up to you. Or anyone else. It’s up to a woman and her doctor to make choices regarding her body.

Bodily autonomy is a right no one should have taken away.

I’m sure you’ve heard this argument, but for those who haven’t it goes something like this. I have a right to my body and my body alone. You have a right to your body and your body alone. If I were to be diagnosed with cancer tonight and you were the ONLY person in the entire world who is a match for a bone marrow transplant, I could not force you to donate. Doctors could not force you to donate. If you did not want to donate, you could walk away. Even if you were to die immediately after my diagnosis, the doctors could not harvest bone marrow if you had not given consent prior to your passing. Pregnant women have the right to bodily autonomy, too. In the early stages of their pregnancy, they have the right to choose their body at the expense of the embryo growing inside of them. To force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term and sacrifice her body for another is to deny her rights that a dead body is given.

Choosing to be intimate with your partner and choosing to be a parent are two different things.

Mistakes happen. Birth control screws up, condoms break, sometimes people simply aren’t educated on the matter of conception. It happens. To argue that “if you have sex you know the risks” is telling a woman that she must either not have sex or expect to be a mother. Which clearly is a terrible ultimatum. Everyone should know the consequences of sex, but just because you’re aware of them doesn’t mean they can’t happen.

It takes two to create a child.

We seem to forget this. We seem to put all of the responsibility on the mother which is not right when another party is involved. If you believe a woman should carry a baby to term, then you need to also believe that a man should work to emotionally and financially support (financially support his half of the bills) his child’s mother throughout the pregnancy. If a woman can’t get out, neither should the man. The sucky thing with that? You can’t force someone to stay. But you’re trying to ban a woman from leaving her pregnancy.

Legalized abortion allows for safe procedures.

If you take away a woman’s right to abortion based on something YOU believe in, you’re not taking away her access to abortion - you’re taking away her access to a SAFE abortion. Like it or not, abortions will continue to happen whether they’re banned or not. Women will try at home procedures or go to an underground abortion clinic and run the risk of being exposed to unhygienic utensils.

Life does not begin at conception.

I hate to break it to you, but it’s true. From someone who took way too many biology classes than she cared for, I can confirm (alongside of millions of LICENSED MEDICAL DOCTORS WHO SPENT YEARS STUDYING CELLS) that life does not begin at conception. At the moment of conception, a sperm and an egg join to form a zygote. A zygote is a diploid cell created from two haploid cells. In laymen’s terms, it’s a cell that has a complete set of chromosomes. Want to know a another example of a diploid cell? Your skin cells. Unless you want to cry out that ever scratching yourself (causing your skin cells to fall off) is a form of murder, then please shut your mouth over the removal of a zygote.

Personhood begins with the fetus is viable.

Your age does not commence when you are conceived, it begins the moment you are born. Embryos and fetuses (fetuses up until a certain point) are unable to live outside of the mother. Period. They are not viable. They are not capable of surviving on their own.

Women who are allowed abortions are less likely to experience mental health issues than those who are denied.

I fully understand that many of them women who undergo abortions experience mental health issues following the procedure (you can’t ban something just because it might cause mental health issues, but that’s a whole other can of worms), but they experience far less mental health issues than those who are denied their right to an abortion. A Sep. 2013 peer-reviewed study comparing the mental health of women who received abortions to women denied abortions found that women who were denied abortions "felt more regret and anger" and "less relief and happiness" than women who had abortions.

Some women cannot financially bring a child into this world.

To ask those women to choose between somehow magically finding the money or to remain abstinent is absurd. If a woman finds out she is pregnant and knows she cannot financially bring a child into this world, why force her to keep it? She is twice as likely as women in her financial situation before the pregnancy to fall below the poverty line, depend on welfare, or use food stamps. Unless you are for the use of your tax dollars to support welfare and food stamps to support a child you are forcing a woman to bring into this world, then you need to sit down. The majority of pro-lifers are totally against the use of an governmentally provided aid to help raise said child.