Column: Pro-choice is very different from pro-abortion
By Lisa Pett
It’s time to address the cognitive dissonance of the words “pro-life” and the actions of the people who describe themselves as pro-life.
While Mr. Kontos refers to the pro-choice crowd as “pro-abortion,” let’s be very clear that the “pro-life” stance is more accurately “anti-abortion.” Anyone who identifies as pro-life but fails in every other way to support life needs to face the fact that they are simply anti-abortion.
Nobody has an abortion and thinks, “Yay! Abortion!” It’s usually an emotionally fraught decision dictated by a whole host of problems: health of the fetus, the health of the pregnant person, age of the pregnant person, financial hardships, trauma from sexual assault or incest. None of those are easy issues to deal with. Especially when you have someone removing the choice from you.
Pro-life, at its heart, is the desire to preserve and improve lives. Not make lives harder. Or, you know, end them. LIfe is achieved not simply by having a beating heart, working lungs, or a functioning brain.
Humans are born. But if they are not nurtured, then life means nothing. Food, shelter, education, health care, safety, and a liveable environment make life…liveable. People born without these things live miserably and die early.
You can’t just will away nature or the vagaries of the human body, or genetic anomalies. One-quarter of all pregnancies are aborted spontaneously. Thousands more end with the death of the mother or the baby either pre or post-natally. And the treatment for some of those things is abortion. That’s right. The treatment for an ectopic pregnancy? Abortion. It ends the pregnancy. But left untreated, it will result in a dead mother as well. The US ranks poorly in infant mortality among wealthy nations. And worse in maternal mortality rates.
Putting aside medical emergencies, let’s look at the post-natal issues that “pro-lifers” ignore.
They include food, shelter, safety, healthcare, and education.
A pro-life person would, one assumes, vote for policies that support pregnant people and their offspring with all of these things? Except they do not. Republicans in Wisconsin refused to expand Medicaid to help the working poor afford medical care. Republicans cut education funding. Republicans cut funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) or pushed for expensive and unnecessary drug testing to access benefits. Republicans refuse to take action on the dire state of childcare in Wisconsin. Republicans in Wisconsin refuse to pass common sense gun safety legislation like universal background checks.
What are these champions of life doing for pregnant people in Wisconsin? Outlawing abortion and cutting taxes. The least effective way of preventing abortion. This is not pro-life. What’s especially sad is that a lot of decent, self-described pro-life people say “now the real work starts.” As if the last 50 years never happened. They want to start “helping” the people they are now forcing to give birth.
They don’t want to prevent abortions with accessible birth control or comprehensive sex education. They don’t want to subsidize poor families with housing or food assistance. They want a fresh supply of infants available for adoption. Completely ignoring over 100,000 children currently in need of families in this country.
Mr. Kontos, constitutional originalist that he is, believes that the very real issue of bodily autonomy is not at stake here. The Constitution doesn’t mention abortion, so abortion is not a constitutional right. The Constitution doesn’t mention a lot of things. Driver’s Licenses, for one–A driver’s license issued in one state, doesn’t stop at the state line. Marriage licenses issued in one state are not invalid in another. Why should medical treatment be curtailed between states?
Oh, the states WILL decide. And the last time we had a very important issue of individual freedom and bodily autonomy decided by the states, the Union shattered. Not because some states wanted to keep slavery and some states abolished it. But because the pro-slavery states demanded more and more action from free states–People of color were kidnapped from free states and enslaved. Because their rights were not enshrined in the original constitution. And state legislatures are already crafting laws against interstate travel for an abortion.
The framers of the Constitution (with the exception of Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton) were all wealthy, white men. Some were quite brilliant–it was the Age of Enlightenment, after all. So enlightened that, brilliant though they were, they did not feel the need to institute either universal suffrage, or freedom and bodily autonomy to anyone who wasn’t exactly like them. John Adams believed that any man who did not own property should not be allowed to vote.
This is why we need federal laws to stretch across the country to protect the individual’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Because some states’ ideas on life and liberty are very, very different.
This is why people are panicking. This is why people are marching and shouting. Because other rights are definitely in the crosshairs. Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas have both stated that federal protections in other decisions are suspect for the same reasons they overturned Dobbs. So yes, gay marriage IS at risk. Birth control IS at risk. And they just might disappear while you’re celebrating.
Pett is a former full-time journalist who lives with her husband and children in Hull.