The Pro Life Cause Re-Examined.

I change my mind all the time about little things. Everybody does. The big things are another matter altogether. Opinions on big picture issues are formed by experiences and observations made over a lifetime and at some point I become so polarized that I disregard evidence that might cause me to modify my opinion and accept only those inputs that reinforce it. I think this is not a phenomenon exclusive to me. I think most people do it. I think I have tried, more than most, to construct my beliefs myself, rather than to simply adopt those of my family, culture and peers.

I think it is time for people of a liberal persuasion to take another look at the pro life movement. The core of my beliefs on this subject were forged when I was a child and adolescent. Those were different times in America. The things that I saw happening to women forced to endure a pregnancy and raise a child outside of culturally sanctioned conditions, who had to change the course of their lives at a young age to fit within cultural norms necessary to raise a child or risk their own death to avoid it, perhaps no longer exist, in this country.

The reason I took so long to reevaluate my position on pro life issues was because of the pro life movement itself. No other major political or social advocacy movement is so filled with ignorant, hate filled, violence prone, cretins. They offer no real plans for how to deal with the addition to American society of millions of children, born to mothers, many without financial or psychological resources to raise them. These forces continue to couple an insistence on sexual abstinence along with a pro life agenda. They seek to return to the culture of punitive condemnation and ostracism that made life for women before legalized abortion, so intolerable. Always in the pro life movement there is the drumbeat of the most repressive, superstitious, intolerant and evangelical sectors of organized religion. Finally, the unbending insistence that women must be coerced into continuing a pregnancy by law enforcement agencies, the judicial system and ultimately, criminal penalty, make the current pro life movement impossible for me to support.

In the end one indisputable fact remains. Every one of us, not at deaths door already or enduring horrible debility, pain and suffering, is pro our own life, no matter what. The desire to continue our own lives is the most overriding of all. Those unborn, while they may have advocates, cannot advocate for themselves. They are the most vulnerable of all of us and deserve the most consideration. This has nothing to do with religion or morality. Those who make it so do disservice to those they seek to protect.

I could never join the current pro life movement. Those who lead the movement and are most active within it are the same hate mongering, reactionary, religious zealots who caused the problems associated with illegitimacy in the first place. The very term illegitimacy says all you need to know about them. The tactics of the pro life movement are hate rhetoric, violence and even murder rather than dialogue, programs of support and acceptance for pregnant women and increased indoctrination, education and availability of all types of birth control. There are certain to be many among the pro life movement who understand its fundamental flaws but support it anyway. Those people must be co opted into a new movement that can be embraced by larger numbers. The movement must move from John Brown to Abraham Lincoln, hopefully avoiding a civil war, this time.

The pro life cause is a valid one but it must change to achieve its goals. As it exists today it is nothing more than polarizing thuggery that gets us nowhere and helps no one.