Pro-choice?

Last post on Bristol Palin, I promise, but . . .

There's a subtext to the criticism here that I find very uncomfortable.  Any number of commenters seem to be implying that what a GOOD parent would have done is encouraged her daughter to get an abortion.

I call myself pro-choice.  Not pro-abortion.  Pro-choice.  A choice that I think should be made as rarely as possible.  I applaud girls and women who are willing to do the difficult thing and carry the child to term at considerable personal cost. 

I realize that many pro-choicers view abortion, as I do not, as a morally neutral act.  But this is supposed to be about women doing what is right for them.  What is right for you includes your moral beliefs about when a fetus becomes a full human life.  There are a whole bunch of really bad beliefs bundled here:  that you KNOW when life begins, and Bristol Palin does not; that you know that motherhood is wrong for her; that the most important thing in the entire world is having the same four years of carefree quasi-adulthood at a good college that I (and presumably you) did; that you, in short, are far better positioned to know what is right for Bristol Palin, whom you have never met and who lives several thousand miles from you, than do Bristol Palin and her family.

This is everything the pro-lifers tar us with:  arrogant, elitist, anti-motherhood, pro-abortion rather than pro-choice.  Liberal values are supposed to be about giving people space to make their own moral decisions, not forcing your own on them.  I thought that's what we were supposed to hate about conservatives . . .