Here’s the deal. I can appreciate that there are some who have an authentic conscientious objection to abortion based on their religious and moral beliefs. But if you are to claim a bonafide ‘pro-life’ position, you must also support the following:
- Universal prenatal care
- Universal maternal care (Related to #1 but not the same. Read this, this, this, and this)
- Paid maternity and paternity leave, including cases of adoption
- Universal healthcare, including mental health services
- Social supports and food programs that promote food security
- A living wage, including equal pay for women
- Affordable housing
- Potable water (Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have lead-free water)
- Affordable, quality childcare
- Universal Pre-K/Headstart programs
- Fully funded public schools (including well-paid teachers)
- Disruption of the school-to-prison pipeline that fuels the prison industrial complex
- Universal sex education, including issues of consent
- Universal domestic abuse prevention, rape prevention, and healthy masculinity education (like Men Can Stop Rape)
- Removal of all structural protection for rapists, child molesters, and sexual predators of all types
- Strong prosecution of rape cases, from processing rape kits to heavy sentencing for convicted rapists (none of this or this or this)
- Laws blocking the parental rights of rapists (yes, rapists’ parental rights exist)
- Outlawing the death penalty
- Supporting strict gun control
- Outlawing all assault weapons
- Widespread drug treatment programs
- Wraparound supports for military families, including domestic abuse prevention
- Humane treatment of immigrant and refugee families, including the reunification of families displaced by the United States’ separation policies
- A path to citizenship for undocumented individuals (ideally accompanied by a civics lesson on how previous generations of immigrants legally immigrated to the US and why the current system makes legal immigration nearly impossible to do)
This list, while extensive, is hardly exhaustive. If a person deigns to call themselves ‘pro-life’ but they don’t support those structural changes, legal protections, social services, healthcare access, education, and immigration policies that promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then they are not pro-life at all, merely pro-birth. And those who seek to require all pregnancies be carried to term even as they support policies that devalue, disenfranchise, incarcerate, or cut short the lives of so many sound like they are trying to control the production of a woman’s uterus for their own purposes. Not a good look. (We recall that, not so long ago, enslaved women were raped with impunity, partly to ‘breed slaves’ for the economic gain of slaveowners. If we understand that the prison industrial complex is the latest iteration of forced labor in service to the economic gain of a few, then we can make a reasonable deduction about the real reason driving the passion with which many men argue for the sanctity of lives they don’t value and won’t invest in.)
Abortion is a difficult issue for many. There are some women who oppose abortion for themselves, even in the face of very challenging circumstances like rape, incest, the viability of the pregnancy due to genetic abnormalities, or even the risk to their own health. For those women and girls who wish to carry those pregnancies to term, there should be ample supports for them and their families to do that so that they all have the best chance at health, education, and fulfillment on the other side of birth.
But there are women who agonize over this multi-pronged issue and arrive at a different choice. And they should have that choice. It comes as no surprise to any of the most strident voices opposing abortion that all pregnancies result from a person who is biologically male having sex with a person who is biologically female. All. And yet, those biological men always have a choice. They can deny their culpability, claim there was consent, miss child payments, shame and silence women, or even win parental rights for the child conceived by their rape of the child’s mother. This is a problem.
You can be pro-life and pro-choice, too.