Sorry for the intentionally derisive headline but I have a point to make here. Consider this Part 2, of my series on abortion and my contention that abortion is a much more complicated issue that simply being pro or con, pro-life or pro-choice, etc.

In my first installment, I made an observation that was really more of a commentary against the validity of Christianity than it was a commentary on abortion. Going forward, I’m going to address a series of ideas that don’t get brought up very much in the abortion debate. I have no agenda here, I simply find this discussion fascinating and amazingly complex, much more complex than I the way I see it normally framed.

So, you may be wondering, how exactly does abortion save lives?

This is actually a surprisingly easy question to answer.

I have a very good friend named, Wendy (not her real name, but real person). Wendy is a former Christian that now self-identifies as agnostic. When she was in college, she had a one night stand, got pregnant, and made the very difficult decision to have an abortion (confiding only in her roommate; not her family, not the young man she slept with). Wendy considers herself “pro-life,” and some twenty-odd years after her abortion, she still struggles with guilt over her decision. Wendy is married, and the mother of three fantastic children.

Over coffee, about a year ago, we were discussing some aspect of the abortion debate, and Wendy was really struggling with the residual guilt that she harbored—Wendy, like me, was raised Catholic, so guilt is in her DNA. During the conversation, a thought occurred to me and I leaned over to her and said, “you know, if you didn’t get that abortion and had that baby back in college, your kids would never have been born.” This caught her off guard, but she immediately understood my thought.

Now, we parents love to feel that our kids are “meant to be here,” but the fact of the matter is that if Wendy had a child in college, her life would have played out differently than it did. And there’s absolutely no chance that the three particular sperm and three particular eggs that needed to fuse together to make her children, would have ever crossed paths. She probably would never have even met her future husband.

Wendy still carries guilt and probably always will, but her stance on the abortion issue has softened, which was not my intent. I simply had an organic thought during a conversation.

PLEASE, PLEASE understand that this observation is not a moral argument for or against abortion rights, nor is it a commentary on selecting some potential children over other potential children.

This observation does have a practical application with regard to abortion statistics, however. One abortion does not necessarily equal one net less life on Earth. Any given woman that has an abortion might end up having more, less, or the same number of children by the end of her procreative run than she would have had if she had not had an abortion. You could also consider the potential children that come into play that the men involved would have a hand in. And if you really wanted to get dizzy, you could consider the endless next generations of potential children that would or would not come into play based on a countless combination of scenarios. In reality, almost any random encounter between two people has this same effect on the chain of human reproduction, but we’re getting away from the point, now.

All of this may sounds cold, but it happens to be true. And, again, I AM NOT addressing any ethical issues here; I’m simply making observations that I find interesting.