Response to a Pro-Lifer

Alright, so this may be a fairly delayed response, but I’ve been insanely busy this past week. A gentleman by the name of “Mickey” commented last Thursday on my post about a Scranton Bishop condemning pro-choice voters, saying this:

You’re argument is about the quality of a person’s life…not the right of the person to have a life. The last time someone made this argument, they were justifying slavery.
Either a person has an inalienable right to life, or they do not. The Declaration of Independence, the Founders, and the Constitution all make the case that people have the right not to be exploited and killed unjustly. The safest place in the world should be the womb of a mother…and the violence of abortion destroys life and deeply wounds the mother.
Abortion victimizes women, destroys lives, and degrades humanity. It is a crime against humanity.
You say, “people are going to do it anyway.” This is true of any number of human crimes like drug abuse, DUI, theft, murder, and rape. The “they’re going to do it anyway” is no reason not to prohibit the behavior. By all means, address the root causes of poverty and irresponsibility, but don’t use the state to sanction murder and violent violation of a woman through abortion.

Usually, I wouldn’t dedicate an entire post to a simple comment, but most of the responses we get in disagreement are something to the effect of, “FUK YOU LIBEREL COCKSUKER FUCK BITCH COCK!!1!” An articulate response deserves an articulate retort, so this is, verbatim, what I e-mailed back:

So I’d like to start this off by thanking you for responding to my post in a calm and rational matter. As I’m sure you’re aware, many members of the pro-life movement prefer damning and name-calling in all caps when discussing these issues, so I truly appreciate your coherent and logical response. With that said, I’m afraid that I cannot agree with your perspective, as I, too, have valid reasoning.

Let me first address your use of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Founding Fathers by just pointing out that while their ideas were brilliant and their words certainly timeless, they were also a bunch of lying hypocrites, much like today’s politicians. You start your comment by saying that my arguments also justify slavery, but then you invoke the names of slave-owners to back up your argument. These men were writing, “All men are created equal,” while their slaves were outside doing the yard work. Jefferson may have been a radical for his time, but he also fathered children outside his marriage with one of his slaves. While the words sound really nice and everybody wishes they could live up to the impossibly idealistic standards set forth in these documents, reality recognizes that we’re not all as perfect as the lessons we preach.

This brings me to your use of the “sanctity of life” argument. While you did not explicitly use the term, it was implied in your first three paragraphs as the center of your ideology, and while it’s one of those terms that sound really good in theory, it’s also very hard to practice in terms of reality. While you may be a staunch follower of this principle, nature is definitely not as philosophical. How far does the sanctity of life extend? The sanctity of life, by your standards, should include all life, not just the lives of the people I see when I leave my home every day. Just as I cannot directly see a tiny fetus as it begins to grow inside the womb, I also cannot see the germs that are causing me to have a cold or the ant I just stepped on as I walked out onto my porch to grab the morning paper. So should I kill the germs with my antibiotics so that I may live, or should I let them kill me so that I can preserve their right to life? Should I let the ants invade my home because their right to live on this property equals my own? This house was built where a forest used to be, so technically, I murdered thousands of animals, insects, plants, and microscopic organisms by destroying their habitat…but nature has its revenge. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, diseases, plagues, and other natural phenomenon wipe us out every day by the thousands, so I doubt that nature subscribes to this “sanctity of life” idea. Hell, the only way we can sustain healthy bodies is by killing other living things and consuming their energy…it’s nice to say that I believe all living things are equal and every single spark of life is sacred, but I’d be big fucking hypocrite if I didn’t recognize that our very way of life stomps all over that idea.

But maybe you simply mean that human life is sacred, and fuck everything else. That’s all well and good too, but where are you pro-lifers once this children are born? Just as you believe that life begins at conception, I believe that life continues until death. Many of the same lawmakers that support the overturning of Roe v. Wade also cut funding for social programs that would benefit these children and their parents, and the ironic part is that they’re basically being forced to have these unwanted children by these politicians in the first place. You claim to want to “address the root causes of poverty and irresponsibility,” but I also didn’t hear your amazing tax plan that’s going to balance the budget and pay for the food, clothing, shelter, and education of all these “saved” children.

My comment that, “People are going to do it anyway,” was simply my way of asking, “What do you hope to accomplish by making abortion illegal?” Whose minds would you change? How would you improve those lives once they are born? By solving what you see as a problem, you are creating many, many more. You cannot force these parents to give these children proper care. You cannot force people to adopt in record numbers. You cannot force those surrogate parents to raise those children effectively. You can’t force these kids to grow up without any problems because, “Mommy didn’t want me.” You cannot assume that back-alley abortions aren’t going to occur, or that quack abortion doctors aren’t going to spring up to “solve those unwanted problems.” How many children have you adopted? How much money have you donated to needy mothers? How much do you really care, not just in principle, but in practice? If you’re going to support something, either you go all the way or not at all, I say.

I support legal abortion because I recognize that we live in a system, and it’s a cruel and indecent system that feeds the rich and fucks the poor, and nobody has more children than the poor. I won’t argue with you over the exact moment that life “begins” because that’s, relatively, a personal perspective. I will, on the other hand, ask you to recognize that the quality of life, not its sanctity, is what I’m concerned with. In a society where people are living longer and having more children, you have to start thinking about issues like overpopulation and population density. You have to consider that this planet wasn’t meant to sustain so many lives, and neither was this man-made system. Theft, murder, and rape directly infringe on the lives and rights of others, so I cannot support them. Abortion, on the other hand, is something that a woman chooses to do to her own body, so who am I to take away that right?

The fact of the matter is that this shouldn’t be up to us. You commented under the name “Mickey,” so I’m assuming that you’re a guy. Not to be crude, but we can blow our loads and walk away – women aren’t given the same luxury. You will never have to face this decision in your lifetime, unless you happen to be that transsexual that was on Oprah a few months back. Who are you to tell a woman what victimizes her? “Victimizing” implies something being forced upon someone, and last time I checked, there’s nothing written in Roe v. Wade that forces women to have abortions. They may feel, in certain situations, that they do not have a choice, but they, in fact, do when it comes right down to it. If it is such a crime against them, why do so many women support it? If it victimizes women, why would they put themselves through it? My guess would be it’s because they felt like it was the right thing to do for themselves and their lives. Just as you cannot force women to raise children as you’d like them to, you also cannot force them to have children in the first place so that you, personally, can feel better about humanity. And if you think you’re just doing “what’s best for them,” well then that sounds like a justification for slavery.

Thanks for commenting!