Pro-Life vs. Anti-Choice: A Look at Rhetoric

The time has come to acknowledge the importance of words and the intentional choices we make when using them, friends.

There’s a reason both sides of the abortion debate are “pro”. Nobody wants to be recognized as fighting against something, they want to advertise what they’re fighting for. It makes sense: pro-life is fighting for the life of the fetus and pro-choice is fighting for the bodily autonomy of the pregnant woman. Depending on your morals, both can seem like perfectly worthy causes. That’s great, but only in theory.

Let’s go a step farther: let’s look at the policies these different movements support. (I’m going to connect pro-life to the Republican Party and pro-choice with the Democratic Party, not because I believe all Republicans are pro-life and all Democrats are pro-choice, but because that’s how the political parties align.)

In the big picture, pro-choice supports legalizing abortion so that women have safe options available to allow them to make an educated choice if they don’t want to continue their pregnancy.  Pro-life supports banning abortion so there’s nothing to interfere with the fetus’s life. I see the thought here: that if that option isn’t readily available to women with unwanted pregnancies, they’re more likely to carry to term. However, this does nothing to stop the women who cannot or will not proceed with their pregnancy. We’ve all heard of the coat hanger procedures desperate women will resort to, and I don’t think anyone really wants that. But overall, I guess these policies reflect the names of the movements supporting them.

When we look closer, though, it gets a lot fuzzier. In the state of Wisconsin, only 15% out of the 55% of people identifying as pro-life support legalizing abortion in the case that it will save the mother’s life. This confuses me. What could a woman possibly do to make an unborn fetus deserve life more than her? How can a group of people be considered pro-life when they’ll willingly let a woman die in hopes that her child will live to grow up without a mother? I’ve mentioned the idea of quantity of life over quality of life before, but this seems to be condemning both of those goals.

In Texas, there have been about a million and a half bills brought up to regulate abortions since Roe vs. Wade. During this past summer, there was House Bill 2, brought to national attention by Wendy Davis’s 11-hour filibuster.  This bill is meant to impose ridiculous regulations on what circumstances are okay for abortions. The most publicized part was the need of admitting privileges at a local hospital (context is important: many hospitals are Christian-based), but there were also requirements for room size and the need for doctors to administer an abortion pill themselves. (Coincidentally, only 6 of the 42 abortion clinics in Texas would meet these requirements.) It would be hard to justify how this bill represents a pro-life ideal. Instead, it’s actively working to restrict the choices available to women with unwanted pregnancies.

Then we can look at policies that don’t directly deal with abortion, but life itself: the death penalty and gun regulation. The Republican Party, which claims to be pro-life, is in favor of the death penalty. I hope I don’t have to point out the contradiction there or explain anything. They’re effectively saying a fetus’s potential life is more important than its mother’s, but criminals are disposable. When it comes to guns, the Republican Party doesn’t care who buys them, even when it’s causing more than 30,000 deaths a year. Who needs consistency, am I right?

My point is that the pro-life movement isn’t about saving lives anymore, if it ever really was. It relies on emotional manipulation and the elimination of options for women with unwanted pregnancies so they’re forced to carry to term. They aren’t advocating for life in reality anymore, they’re just trying to control women and I’m sick of the pro-life rhetoric obscuring what the movement is actually pushing for. It’s time to be honest about it and call them what they are: anti-choice. We can talk about pro-life when they start caring about other lives.

Stay rad, pals.