We Need to Redefine Pro-Life
It’s time to stop pretending abortion bans are about protecting human rights
Yesterday, I got into my car after work and immediately burst into tears. The news of the passing of the so-called “Human Rights Protective Act” in Alabama hit me deep and hard.
Unbelievably, the bill was signed into law by a woman, Governer Kay Ivey, who hopes that it will go to the Supreme Court and act as impetus for the judges there to overturn Roe v. Wade. The day before, the Governer of Georgia signed a “fetal heartbeat law” into effect, becoming the fourth state this year to pass such legislation. A similar law is about to be passed in Louisiana.
The ridiculousness of banning abortion before six weeks when most women don’t find out they are even pregnant until at least then is a topic for another post. So is the fact that the white men making these laws seem to have no idea how female anatomy actually works.
This isn’t about human rights.
Let’s get one thing straight, these bills have nothing to do with protecting human rights. Unless I’m mistaken, female-bodied humans make up half of humanity. Abortion bans and any other laws that limit access to reproductive care are rooted in misogyny, oppression, and patriarchy.
Abortion bans aren’t just about controlling women’s bodies.
They’re about controlling women’s sexuality. Owning women.
From limiting birth control to banning comprehensive sex ed, US religious fundamentalists are working hard to outlaw sex that falls outside their theology.
Ultimately, this is about women’s power.
When women are in control of their sexuality, it threatens a core element underpinning right-wing ideology: patriarchy.
It’s a brutal form of oppression to seize control of the 1 essential thing a person should command: their own body.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 16, 2019
If you’re going to claim to be a champion for human rights, you shouldn’t get to pick and choose which humans you’re willing to protect. You don’t get to decide that some lives matter more than others, or start and stop caring about lives depending on the age of gestation.
Not just one, not just two, but several states in our nation now have laws that will enforce stiffer penalties for victims of rape and incest seeking abortions than for the criminals who committed the rape and incest that got them there. It’s time for politicians to stop pretending they care about people when these laws make it obvious they only care about oppressing women.
Progression of a society should never be about stripping people of their rights. It should be about putting systems in place to support the citizens in ways that enable them to lead full and productive lives. We should be going forwards, not backwards.
We need to stop pretending ANY of this is about the protection of human life.
If this law goes into effect and becomes enforceable, women will die.
Outlawing abortion doesn’t prevent abortion. It just prevents SAFE abortions. But the pro-life label does not extend to the women who will be so desperate that they seek illegal and unsafe medical care.
Women will stay in domestic violence situations they might otherwise be able to escape. If they decide to leave later, they’ll have to contend with the fact that they now have a child with someone who is dangerous. They’ll stay because their child now has the awful chance to become one of the 20% of intimate partner homicide victims who are friends, family members, and other parties peripheral to the domestic violence.
Women will lose hope because their free will, their choices, and their control over their bodies is being taken away from them. It’s hard to convince someone to have hope when everything around them is saying that they are not worth hoping for. Ironically, when a pregnant woman commits suicide, they kill their unborn child too.
We need to redefine pro-life.
It’s time to change the way we use the phrase “pro-life.” To call yourself pro-life, you should have to show compassion for the fragile mind of a 12-year-old child carrying a baby she didn’t ask for, conceived in the unimaginable trauma of rape.
To define yourself as an advocate for human life, you should have to care about what happens to babies after they are born. Yesterday, I shared a tweet from Bryan Lyman about an amendment offered an opportunity to provide some care for the babies these people are insisting be born.
When I read my mother’s response, I didn’t know whether to scream, laugh or cry. Because it’s true. Any politician who claims to be pro-life should care that one in three children in Georgia is living in poverty, and do something to address it. You should not be allowed to pretend you care about lives inside of uteri, but then forsake those human beings once they are born.
Being pro-life should be putting your money where your mouth is and doing something about the fact that your state is 50th in public education rather than spending time creating more un-wanted, un-supportable children to feed into your sub-par system.
If politicians are going to claim to be pro-life, they should be taking action to do something about the rampant school shootings and mass shootings that plague our nation; the fact that in the 135 days of 2019, there have been 105 mass shootings, injuring almost 400 people and killing 120.
In recent years, Georgia has led the nation in maternal mortality rates. To be pro-life, these politicians should have to care that mothers are already dying, every day. They should recognize that their political actions will increase this number.
Placing the existence of a cluster of cells that has no consciousness above the life of developed, breathing, thinking humans is reprehensible.
This is not pro-life.
This is pro-keeping women in check. If a person in a coma had the same level of brain activity and consciousness of a fetus in the first trimester, it would be legal to unplug them.
It’s time to re-define what it means to be pro-life, and what it means to protect human life.
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