Pro-Butchery: Pro-Life isn't pro-life

It's always confusing when people who declare themselves pro-life support things like the death penalty. There's seems to be this fanaticism that life begins at conception and ends at birth... or it if doesn't end, rapidly diminishes in value - the opposite of the way most people view it.

Hence the surreal inversion where people shrieking about the "sanctity of life" gleefully support executions and the mass slaughter of warfare. (Five-hundred thousand kids dead in Iraq? Do you mean, born or unborn? Oh... phew, I thought you meant unborn.)

We know, from those who claim to know the mind of the deity, that god is Pro-Life. Now, Jerry Falwell tells us, "God is Pro-War."

(And his arch Pro-Life colleague, Pat Robertson, accepts the horror of coerced abortions in China, where he has business interests: "If every family over there was allowed to have three or four children, the population would be completely unsustainable.... They're doing what they have to do."

Note that Robertson's faith in his all-powerful god is so weak that he isn't able to believe god will be able to deal with the situation.)


They're also not concerned with the lives of the women are going to terminate their pregnancies. Because making it illegal has nothing to do with stopping abortion. In fact, the restrictions already in place in the US are more likely making the problem worse.

Consider that in permissive Holland, the abortion rate is one-fourth that of the US. The teen pregnancy rate is one-tenth that of the US.

If we really wanted to reduce the abortion rate, wouldn't it make sense to look there?

C. Everett Koop, Reagan's pro-life Attorney General, drove the Pro-Lifers crazy by flatly telling them the truth: The only way you're going to stop abortion is to have foolproof birth control.

But they didn't want to hear that. They booed and despised him for saying it.

That's because they don't care about stopping abortion. They US has this very high abortion rate and they don't have any interest in bringing it down. (The only method of birth-control these people approve of is one conclusively, repeatedly, regularly proven not to work.)

The legislative Damoclean Sword hanging over us makes discussion impossible. It so polarizes the debate - with everyone forced to chose sides between equating it with wart-removal or with cold-blooded murder - that even those making the decision are ill served. How can you talk about adoption, viability outside the womb, etcetera, when the thugs are waiting to kick the doors down.


And lets say that sword falls. Roe v. Wade is torn up. What then? States exert control over women's bodies. Won't that be glorious?

Because the real point it that you'll never stop abortion by making it illegal. All you do is drive it back to the back alley, coat hangers and bleach and baseball bats, young women horribly maimed... and killed.

These are things we're already seeing in states where abortion is substantially restricted. Legalized abortion has been compared with the polio vaccine as an advance in public health.

The real issues of abortion go far deeper than just shrieking outside a clinic. Many of them are economic - that seems to be the single biggest factor women site in choosing not to carry through with a pregnancy.

But issues of wealth distribution are complicated. Make my head hurt. Much easier to just shriek outside the clinic, with no thought of what it'll mean if these efforts are successful.

Anyone genuinely pro-life has to look at the issue realistically, and then start talking about how to proceed, without this lust to control others' bodies.

Why doesn't in bother these people that banning abortion would directly result in the deaths of so many women? Might as well ask why the same people don't seem to care about poverty, famine, disease, wars... Call that a culture of life?

Take your death cult somewhere else. You're not pro-life, you're pro-butchery.

And those who oppose you? You can call us Pro-Liberty.