Why I am Pro-Choice… and it’s not what you think

Once you hit a certain age - my guesstimate is about 6 months - life begins to present you with all kinds of choices:

Green beans or pears?

Nap or tantrum?

Blanky or Binky®?

We quickly move on to harder and more important choices:

Good Night Moon or Harold and the Purple Crayon?

Sand box or swing set?

Crayons or Play-Doh®?

These are only precursors for the really big decisions that life throws our way, and I am not talking about peanut butter and jelly vs. tuna or black licorice vs. Red Vines®. (P.S. The correct answers are: tuna and neither.)

What we (hopefully) are learning when we are young is that with all of our choices, any decision we make, to one degree or another, will have a consequence. Another thing we learn is that we have a voice, and while our opinion does (or at the very least should) matter, the choices we make do, in fact, affect others.

Any time you involve another person in the equation, your opinion becomes subject to how you think that other person (or persons) will react or respond. Take a nap = happy parent. Throw a tantrum = unhappy parent. It doesn’t take long for our awareness of others’ reactions to begin to affect our choices.

I'm not implying that is necessarily a bad thing. Au contraire: It is precisely the premise that our decision-making does impact others, and that we should become aware of it which is the point of my randomizing.

One would hope that, as a child matures into adulthood, the broad range of choices and decisions a child has been previously faced with beginning in infancy through toddler-hood and beyond, will have had the cumulative effect of shaping his/her subsequent choices with an understanding of short-term and long-term consequences. Of course, it is unreasonable to suggest that an adolescent will have the same scope of experience as a 60-year-old, or even a 40-year-old, but even a 13-year-old can grasp the cause and effect of eating too much fair food = crapulence. (Yes, a real word.)

Only someone with their head buried in the sand (or more likely, an iPhone) throughout their formative years will fail to observe that some choices already exercised by others - such as getting behind the wheel of a vehicle while impaired or distracted - have resulted in life-altering or deadly consequences. Counter-intuitively, it would seem, learning from the mistakes of others is not an inherent skill. It would seem that some of us are equipped with some genetic mutation that dupes us into believing that we are smarter than the other guy, and “it won’t happen to me.” Sadly, we are more often wrong than right.

To that end, I am a huge advocate of the idea that people have the right to their opinions as well as choices. We need to know that our opinions matter. When we grow up believing that they don’t matter, there seems to be a tendency to react by making deliberately poor choices in a desperate attempt to prove that we do have a choice and everyone should take notice! That can prove to be the perfect recipe for breeding narcissism and we end up with people making immature decisions in an attempt to try to manipulate and control others. I am no child psychologist and I have not seen any studies to support my theory, so don’t go quoting my opinion in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

Bottom line: our choices and opinions do affect others, sometimes in ways we cannot possibly anticipate. 

With that in mind, I believe it is also our responsibility, if we have been given the privilege to have a voice and input into others' lives, to share our experiences and perspective and our “Maybe... but have you thought about this?” whenever an opportunity presents itself. In fact, I don’t think we should leave those opportunities to chance, but rather be intentional about sharing our experiences, and the successes and failures of our own choices, for what it’s worth, knowing that we will sometimes be ignored, and seldom thanked. But, if we make the choice to take the time to connect and cultivate those relationships in an appropriate manner, who knows how our own failures might be redeemed?