The Hypocrisy of the Pro-Life Movement

CONTENT WARNING: mentions of sexual assault

NOTE: Anybody who has the ability to be pregnant can get an abortion, including trans men and assigned-female-at-birth nonbinary people. In this article, I will sometimes only refer to women, not to exclude, but because the pro-life movement has deep roots in sexism.

For much of American history, abortion was illegal and inaccessible to women. Some women, if they had the money, would fly to another country to get the procedure. However, many women couldn’t afford to travel and would use dangerous methods to perform an abortion on themselves or go to an unauthorized abortion center. Not only were they constantly being shut down, but these abortion centers also could not provide the proper resources or sanitation. However, on January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court made a landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion for the United States.

Everyone has a strong opinion on abortion, whether they’re pro-choice or pro-life. Bringing up the topic will almost always spark controversy. One major question is whether or not a fetus is alive at any stage of pregnancy, and therefore, whether or not abortion is murder. The main argument for the pro-life movement is centered around the idea of abortion as murder, but there is no single scientific consensus. The medical questions should be left to the doctors, rather than people who haven’t studied the topic in-depth. On both sides of this divisive issue, people often start with preconceived notions and search for evidence to apply them to.

Some of the most common reasons that people choose to receive abortions are that they are too young to take care of a baby, live in poverty and can’t afford to support a child, or  were a victim of rape, the baby would live a miserable life or die painfully soon after they were born, and/or the parent could not survive or at the least be endangered physically by giving birth. Should a fetus take priority over the parent’s life? If anybody going to claim to be pro-life, they should care about the life of the parent instead of only the life of the fetus.

Furthermore, if pro-lifers are going to insist on a parent giving birth no matter what, why doesn’t that concern extend to after the pregnancy? While harping on abortion, pro-lifers should support reforming the foster-care system or push for welfare programs for parents who don’t have the finances to raise a baby. Another way to prevent abortion but still support a potential parent is readily available and affordable birth control, but the Catholic Church and many other religious organizations are still anti-contraceptive.

Women deserve to have bodily autonomy, and there is no other medical procedure as controversial yet as safe as abortion. If a woman wanted to get a standard surgery to make her life easier or even save her life, it should be up to the woman and her doctor to decide. But for some reason, people believe that they can make this decision on behalf of a woman, often when they don’t even know the woman or her situation. The decision to get an abortion is often a difficult and emotional one, not one made lightly. It’s damaging when somebody is entering an abortion clinic only to be assaulted with hateful, screaming protesters. The hypocrisy only grows with each new shooting or bombing of an abortion clinic, making women feel unsafe and uneasy.

A 2009 Pew Research Center survey found that people opposing abortion were majority religious, especially Christians like Evangelicals, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witness. Religion is often used to justify hatred of abortion, for instance claiming that God and Jesus would not have wanted a baby to be killed. Religious freedom is essential for society, but there’s a major difference between having individual beliefs and pushing them on others. Nobody is forcing anybody to get an abortion, no matter the situation, and it doesn’t make someone “better than” another. Not everybody shares the same religious beliefs, of course, so using those beliefs as justification for preventing other people from having an abortion is an infringement upon their own religious freedoms. It is crucial to have a safe, readily available option of abortion for people who need it.

Roe v. Wade legalized abortion but left the policy for third-trimester up to state legislatures. Third-trimester abortions are the most uncommon type, but they have been used as fear-mongering by those who believe the unscientific labeling of a “partial-birth abortion.” The wording makes people believe that the fetus is alive and then killed, and the concept is more about motivating people (like evangelical voters) to be pro-life and stopping abortions rather than using hard scientific facts. Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 allowed states to restrict abortions even earlier on based on so-called “fetal viability.”

Today many conservative state governments, like Texas, Missouri, and Kentucky, have been trying to roll back as much of Roe v. Wade as possible. Hundreds of laws have been passed to add ridiculous requirements for abortion clinics to ward off women who want an abortion, such as forcing doctors to make the patient look at a sonogram of the fetus before the abortion. These requirements are used to shut down abortion clinics until they all disappear; for example, there is only one abortion clinic left in the whole state of Missouri. In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court shut down one Texas law that would close down clinics, but many similar provisions remain in legislature around the country.

With the recent confirmation of Supreme Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court has shifted to a conservative majority. Judge Kavanaugh has claimed that he will uphold the Court’s precedents with Roe, but he has made past speeches and interviews signifying less-than-support, and his supporters are majority pro-life. Thus, Roe v. Wade is in danger. Even if Roe v. Wade is repealed, abortions won’t stop happening in states where the legislature is not changed to allow it again, but would often be unsafe and not readily available because of the loss of resources. It would be a profound step backward in progress for our country.

For more details on the fight to roll back Roe v. Wade, check out the Netflix documentary “Reversing Roe.”

by MIRIAM ABRAMS