The Pro-Lifers' Big Lie

A few weeks ago I wrote about abortion opponents’ obsession with Planned Parenthood, and how it reflects their preference for moral superiority over the advancement of their own cause. Well, just in case that hypocrisy wasn’t obvious enough, the recent actions of the state of Texas put it into stark relief.

Yes, the Texas legislature would prefer to deprive 130,000 low-income women of reproductive health care, including contraceptives, rather than allow the funds to be spent at Planned Parenthood.

The logic of such a move is exquisite in its simplicity. Abortion, pro-lifers would say, is murder. How could women’s preventive healthcare ever be as important as stopping baby murder?

Sometimes I attempt to put myself in their mindset, to imagine the moral outrage that abortion opponents must feel. I encourage you to try it. Imagine if the Supreme Court ruled that real, genuine baby murder were a constitutionally protected right. Imagine the Court declaring that the state may not infringe upon parents’ right to kill their own children, say up to age 6. In this scenario we have to imagine that at least half the population not only accepts this ruling, but supports it enthusiastically and fights to protect it. So from there forward in our nightmare scenario, well over a million young children, from birth to age 6, would be euthanized each year by medical professionals, upon the request of their parents -- simply because the parents didn’t want them anymore.

It’s a horrifying, dystopic premise, isn’t it? Can you even begin to imagine what you would do? Personally, I like to think I’d do more than express my disdain for it at cocktail parties, or write screeds about it online. Maybe I would spend my weekends at child euthanasia clinics, desperately trying to convince the entering patrons that what they’re doing is wrong. Or would this enormity be too appalling not to provoke more immediate action? If literally, daily, innocent children were being put to death, would you be satisfied with attending rallies? Election cycle after election cycle, would you vote for the most vocally anti-infanticide candidates on ballot? And what if this went on for 40 years? After 40 years of voting against child murder, you’d find that there’d been no serious attempt to pass a constitutional amendment banning the practice. There’d been no legislation creating new government programs to help take care of the unwanted children, so their parents might not have to kill them in the first place. There’d been no meaningful progress in stopping this wide-scale, wholly legal child murder.

At what point would you find that more drastic measures had to be taken? After how many decades of this abomination do you decide to leave the country, or start an underground resistance? How long until your only option is armed revolt?

The truth is that all but the most radically fanatical abortion opponents don’t really believe that abortion is murder, regardless of what they claim. They couldn’t possibly. People may believe, in a philosophical or abstract sense, that life begins at fertilization, and that an embryo is a human life. But that’s a far cry from believing that there’s no difference at all between an embryo and a fully-formed person.

Still, even though they don’t really feel it, calling abortion murder works for the pro-life movement rhetorically. It’s inflammatory and polarizing, and it automatically grants them the unassailable moral high ground. Nothing can be as wrong as baby killing; nothing can be as important as stopping it. The murder of children is an evil so intolerable, that preventing it trumps women’s reproductive freedom. It trumps the healthcare needs of the poorest women. It trumps all practicality and logic. Who could ever condone baby murder?

Yet we do condone abortion. The vast majority of Americans believe that abortion is acceptable and should be legal under at least some circumstances. I would imagine that if polled on whether euthanizing preschoolers might be okay even under very limited circumstances, significantly fewer people would get on board. Almost everybody knows that, whatever their personal feelings about the morality of abortion, it is most certainly different from actually killing a child.

By adopting this extremist rhetoric which even most pro-life people don’t sincerely believe, the movement shuts out all possibility of compromise, or even conversation. It places moral correctness above the practical goal of preventing abortions from happening. It also places moral correctness above the very real concern of women’s access to reproductive healthcare, and far, far above women’s liberty. No other matter can ever approach the urgency of ending legally-sanctioned infanticide.

If those who find abortion morally abhorrent really want to make constructive advances toward their ostensible goal, they need to let go of the polarizing and exaggerated claims about embryonic personhood. They’ve disingenuously chosen a position which precludes cooperation and therefore precludes progress. They’ve embraced the sort of cognitive dissonance that has allowed them to endure 40 years of minimal headway on what they claim is the most urgent issue of our lifetime. In lieu of demanding an end to abortion, they’ve been content to be strung along by leaders who declare devotion to their moral cause, yet do next to nothing to move that cause forward -- except to increasingly make a big show of trampling upon women’s rights. These self-proclaimed “pro-lifers” have chosen moral righteousness over moral rightness, and in doing so revealed their underlying contempt for women.

I think it’s time to call out the pro-life movement on their big lie. It’s time to insist upon, at the very least, a little intellectual honesty.