An Open Letter to “Pro-Lifers”

Abortion is setting up to be a major issue in the upcoming election, so I want to direct this posting directly to those who call themselves pro-life.

Please stop!  You are not pro-life. You are only pro-birth, and to call yourself pro-life is misleading and hypocritical.

Let’s begin with you “pro-life” women who are taking birth control pills. Those pills either prevent the fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus, which is an abortion, or they prevent the sperm from attaching to the egg, which is its first cousin.  If you can take those pills, how can you possibly in good conscience deny that same right to other women?

But beyond that, if you were truly pro-life you would care about the life of the baby you are forcing into this world.  But you don’t.  You don’t give a damn about that baby.  You abandon that baby the very moment she or he leaves the womb.

You don’t care that that baby will grow into an unwanted, unloved child, just the kind of person who ends up spending most of his life in prison, if not on death row.   And once that person is on death row, most of you will cheer for him to be legally murdered, or at the very least you will sit quietly by while the executioner does his thing.  So much for being pro-life.

Neither do you care one whit about the life of the mother who you force to produce and rear a child she did not want, probably will not love, and more often than not cannot afford.  If she had money she could at least escape the state that denies her the right to choose what happens to her own body – assuming her state’s laws will allow her to leave – and find a haven that will allow her to have an abortion.  But without money she can’t even do that.  Without money, she is sunk.

It would be different if science could prove when that embryo becomes a person, but science doesn’t even pretend to know when that happens.  Therefore you merely assume, as I once did, that human life begins at conception.  I used to think that because all that embryo needs to become a human is sustenance and time.  But Jennifer Haigh put that idea to rest when she wrote these words in her 2022 novel Mercy Street:

“What makes a woman a person?  Her mind and her memories, all that she has done and felt and known and created and thought and wondered and seen and understood.  But the fetus inside her?  It has no thoughts or memories, it has made nothing, understood nothing.  It is a mute, unthinking knot of tissue – alive, yes, but unformed, unconscious, incapable of tenderness or reasoning or even  laughter.  And yet, the fetus now becomes what matters the most.  The woman carrying it, that complex creature formed by 20 or 30 years of living in the world becomes simply the means of production.  Her feelings about the matter, her ideas and needs and desires, don’t matter at all.  Yes, the fetus inside her is a living tissue, no question.  But it is not a living person.  It is, at most, raw material.  The woman carrying it can, if she wishes, make it into a person.  But what is the point of  making another person when the woman herself, already a person, counts for so little?”

 Many of you “pro-life” people, or perhaps most, cite religion as your reason for being “pro-life.”  But that doesn’t work either.  Neither the Protestant Bible (more than 480,000 words) nor the Catholic Bible (more than 783,000 words because it contains seven extra chapters) mentions the word abortion.  Jesus never mentioned it. Neither did any of his Apostles.  Neither did any of the Prophets.  No one whose writings are in the Bible mentioned it.  No one.  Not ever.  Not once.

So let’s talk about your religious objections.

Protestants:  Abortion has never been an issue in most mainstream and liberal Protestant churches, and it still isn’t.  Neither was it an issue in most conservative churches until 1979, and the reason they got involved then had nothing to do with religion.  It was all about politics.

Here’s the story:  The IRS was beginning to threaten the tax-exempt status of religious groups that ran racially segregated schools, specifically Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C.  To combat the IRS, high-powered Christian nationalist leaders – among them Bob Jones Sr., Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich – decided to “restore America’s moral foundation” by creating a hot-button issue to oppose government regulation, regardless of whether it had anything to do with segregation, and they lit on abortion.  Their plan worked so well that ever since then conservative denominations have been strongly anti-abortion.  You can read details of this in Katherine Stewart’s 2022 book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.

 Catholics: The Catholic Church’s opposition goes back much farther, back to 1679.  Until then, the church operated under two propositions, one of  which said that it should be lawful for a woman to procure an abortion, and the other said that it “seems probable that the fetus (as long as it is in the uterus) lacks a rational soul and begins first to have one when it is born: and thus it must be said that no abortion is a homicide.”  But in 1679 Pope Innocent XI issued the papal bull Sanctissimus Dominus that condemned those propositions, and the church hasn’t looked back since.  It has made some adjustments, but his basic anti-abortion rule still holds.

Islamists: The Muslim religion is founded on the Quron, which does not directly address intentional abortion.  It leaves the question to the discretion of individual countries.

Jews: Judaism is the oldest monotheistic religion in the world, with its origins tracing back more than 3,000 years, and from its earliest days it has always asserted that a fetus becomes a person at birth.  Today’s Jews feel so strongly about it that they are making the case that the Supreme Court is violating the Constitution by interfering with their religious rights.

Which brings us to the Supreme Court.  Donald Trump’s three appointees made it abundantly clear during their confirmation hearings that they considered Roe vs. Wade settled law and they respected settled law. Then they proved themselves perjurers at their first opportunity when they leaped on Roe vs. Wade to kill a woman’s right to control her own body.  It was the first time in history that the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional right that it had specifically issued.  As Margaret Atwood suggested, the court, by forcing women to have babies against their will, forced them into slavery.  Surely, “pro-lifers,” you must agree that it is astounding that the court cannot force you to wear a mask, but it can force you to have a baby.

At least there is some light peeping through all this darkness.  The Washington Post reported a few days ago that a growing number of men in red states are speaking out in defense of reproductive rights.  Most of those men were either vehemently “pro-life” or had never given the issue much thought until they witnessed the harrowing experiences their wives or friends were forced to suffer when their pregnancies went tragically awry and “pro-life” laws endangered their health, their ability to bear children, and even their lives.

So please, if you are “pro-life,” think about what you are doing. Think hard.  Please.