Pro-life or anti-abortion?

The two are not the same.

Photo credit: Maria Oswalt/Unsplash.com...

A couple of weeks ago, I was struck by a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter. LifeNews, an account that I’ve followed for a very long time, said, “If a politician supports killing babies in abortions, what they say about anything else doesn't matter.”

I couldn’t disagree more.

I’ll start by saying that I’m pro-life. I can remember first hearing about abortion when I was in the upper grades of elementary school. A girl I knew was doing a project about abortion and surveyed some of us other children. My reaction at the time was a disbelieving, “How is that legal?” Honestly, I’m still not sure.

While I do oppose abortion, I realize that my position is in the minority. To a certain extent, anyway. Most Americans seem to be centrists on the issue, rejecting both unfettered abortion as well as strict bans. The national consensus seems to be somewhere along the “safe, legal, and rare” axis.

For me, being pro-life also does not end at abortion. I’m pro-life when it comes to life-saving vaccines and safety net programs, for example. As I’ve pointed out in the past, pro-family policies like funding daycares, providing health insurance for children, and making it more affordable to have children would probably help to reduce demand for abortion, since financial pressures are cited as one of the top reasons for abortion. I also think that if a government is going to mandate the birth of unborn children, it has a moral obligation to help the parents pay for them. Likewise, contraception should be made readily available to prevent unwanted pregnancies. I’ve found that a lot of pro-lifers do not hold this view.

All that is to say that I’m both pro-life and anti-abortion, but I have a more nuanced view than just saying anyone who supports abortion is evil. Part of that is because I started talking to people on the opposite side of the issue. Sure, there are people who are radical, but the vast majority of pro-choice people that I’ve talked to don’t celebrate every abortion and don’t want up-to-the-moment-of-birth infanticide. They want an early limit in the pregnancy and availability for people with health problems and inadequate financial resources. We can argue about the validity of these positions, but it’s a far cry from the stereotype portrayed by the right. I’ve also learned that pro-choicers don’t have three heads or a tail.

Getting back to the LifeNews post, with a very few exceptions, I don’t think single-issue voting is a good idea in this day and age. If you start out using abortion as your sole issue, you might, for instance, soon find yourself defending people accused of sexual abuse of the same children that you want to ensure are born.

Is the sex trafficking of minors really better than abortion? That’s a no from me, dawg.

But a lot of the people I talk to on the pro-life side seem to hold unborn babies above the post-born in their political calculations. To cite another example, the Trump Administration’s cuts to USAID and other foreign aid programs have been immensely damaging to the third world. Poverty-stricken countries that relied on the US for food and medicine were abruptly cut off with no opportunity to find alternate sources. Food that was already purchased was destroyed rather than handed out as a last shipment. The death toll from starvation and disease is estimated at more than 700,000 people, more than 500,000 of them children. I hear zero concern about this from the pro-life movement.

In general, the pro-life movement seems to be more of an anti-abortion movement than a true pro-life movement. Being pro-life should include protecting post-born children with vaccines, not winking at anti-vaxxers as nearly-eradicated diseases like measles return with a vengeance. What is amazing is how quickly these diseases are returning due to the loss of herd immunity from declining vaccination rates. Being pro-life should include protecting the elderly with good access to medical care. It should not include telling the elderly that they need to sacrifice themselves for the economy in a pandemic.

The irony is that the rhetoric on both sides does not always match the results. The US abortion rate ticked down for decades under both Democratic and Republican presidents before starting to trend upward again under [wait for it] Donald Trump in his first term. Since then, abortion has once again continued to rise under both Trump and Biden, despite the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

Part of the problem is that abortion pills make it very easy to end a pregnancy now. A trip to the local (or out-of-state) abortion clinic is now almost superfluous. You can just get the drugs by mail. There is a lawsuit challenging mail-order abortifacients, but [wait for it again] the Trump Administration just last month asked the courts to delay a decision on the case. This is the same Administration that says it wants to be “flexible” on the Hyde Amendment that bars taxpayer funding for abortion.

So, in the grand scheme of things, the issue of abortion is a lot more nuanced than the activists would have you believe. I’d probably venture to guess that even Life News doesn’t agree with everything that Donald Trump says and does on abortion, but I’m equally sure that they won’t celebrate the decline of abortion under Barack Obama.

In my view, if we want to reduce abortion in a world in which abortion technology is advancing to streamline the process, the focus should be on winning hearts and minds rather than putting forth more top-down bans. Winning the moral argument that unborn babies are human beings and deserving of life and dignity should be paired with a bipartisan push to make parenting easier and more affordable.

But pro-life groups cede their moral authority when they make the Life News argument that voicing support for legal abortion is the worst thing that any politician can do, while supporting corrupt politicians with no respect for life or law. Most voters are going to see this for the naked partisanship that it is, and the movement ends up kneecapping itself. The pro-life movement, like the pro-gun movement, will find itself in a continual existential crisis if it joins itself at the hip to an increasingly dysfunctional Republican Party. Long-term success for both movements requires a broad bipartisan base.

You can’t find pro-life politicians in the Democratic Party, you say? First, that’s not true. John Bel Edwards, a recent governor of Louisiana, was a pro-life Democrat, and there used to be more. Second, if pro-lifers want to see more pro-life Democrats, they need to feed, water, and cultivate pro-life liberals where they can find them, rather than reflexively declaring that the worst Republican is better than the best “Demonrat.” As Jesus said, seeds can’t sprout on rocky ground. (And yes, there are Democratic Christians as well; many are growing bolder about their faith and their politics.)

I said before that single-issue voting isn’t the best idea in the current economic climate, but there is an exception to that. If you’re going to vote on one issue and one alone, the most important issue of the moment is preserving the Constitution and our democracy. (Yes, we are also a republic. A republic is a form of democracy.)

If we lose our Constitutional protections and our freedom to choose our government, most of the other issues we quibble about will really matter. And that includes abortion and other pro-life issues, because authoritarians are famously anti-life when it comes to their opposition. Anti-abortion groups may be okay with that. Pro-life groups won’t be.

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