01/30/2007 09:21:28 AM EST
You can't be anti-abortion and be pro-life
posted by Avedon
I really wish progressives would not use the conservative movement's language, which not only falls into their frame, but misrepresents the issues.
Anti-abortion people aren't pro-life, they are anti-abortion. Talk to 98% of them for more than 15 minutes and what you generally find is that the bottom line isn't about life at all, it's about punishing people for unapproved sex, and about controlling women.
For a position to be genuinely pro-life, it should decrease the likelihood that people will die. And even if we leave aside the fact that every other conservative position is one that, far from protecting life, actually increases death and maiming, it's worth remembering that being anti-abortion is itself pro-death.
Conservative positions in general (war, eliminating worker safety regulation, preventing or destroying economic security and healthcare availability for most Americans, devolving agencies that protect the public from corporate malfeasance, etc.) act specifically against the enhancement of your chances (and those of your children) of staying alive.
But experience throughout the world shows that bans on abortion merely increase the likelihood that pregnant women will die. Such bans do not reduce abortion, they just reduce safe, legal abortion. Moreover, societies that ban abortion also are the ones that prevent good sex education and access to birth control, thus increasing the need for abortion.
It is not an accident that as the anti-abortion movement has become bolder in the United States, there are increasing moves to make birth control less accessible.
It is not an accident that the same people who oppose abortion also oppose making the HPV vaccine available to young women.
It is not an accident, either, that the same people who support forced birth control for women on welfare and sterilizing poor and black women are part of the movement that calls itself "pro-life".
The way to reduce abortion and save lives is to provide good, comprehensive sex education to children from the beginning, and to make birth control easily available, while improving the economic prospects of people who might otherwise find pregnancy too much of a burden.
That is the only truly pro-life position.
So please stop using the anti-life party's terminology; they anti-abortion, and most emphatically not pro-life.
