Becoming Pro-Life: From Extreme to Compassionate

The group in which I was involved changed my views dramatically, even if I didn't speak out on those changes. I had been an extremist, I think, regarding the Pro-Choice stance. Then I became (oddly) less extreme, but still very much Pro-Choice. Then I was on the fence--for the longest time. I didn't call myself one way or the other--for multiple reasons, not just that I was becoming less extreme. Let me start off with explaining these views.

A lot of Pro-Choicers, particularly extremists, are not going to like this post. I'm going to be blunt. It's not going to be pretty. But I want you to see what I saw. Clearly I hung around some pretty bad people. And I was one of them. I was a bad person. I refuse to deny this. Some might say I'm attacking their views. If you believe this, I hope that you think about the views I attack and I'd be glad to talk about them with you as well. I don't delve too deep into opposing arguments, but I hint at them here and there. Also, there is a lot of sarcasm ahead. I'm not posting this to debate. I'm posting this to tell you what I (and others) believed, and I will be blunt.

Pro-Choice Extremists

"I don't call pro-choicers heartless because they believe in taking the life of unborn children, so why [do you] call us heartless because we're trying to save those children [...] ? I would just ask that you try to see it from our point of view rather than attack who [Pro-Lifers] are needlessly and make strawman arguments."

~Clinton Wilcox to me

(name used with permission)

I don't start with "Abortion Extremist" because I don't recall ever supporting forced abortion--maybe in the case of severe disability of a woman, but, and I will put this as horribly blunt as it really is: severely mentally disabled women who get pregnant fall out of the scope of the Pro-"Choice" movement. We fully support someone else deciding for her to abort--she can't make the decision for herself. Birth would be terrible, we say. Birth would be horrible, we justify. Abortion is not traumatic by any means, even to someone who cannot understand the process (and even if it is, even if it scars her for life, birth is always worse). The severely mentally disabled woman gets no choice and we would be perfectly content with the "choice" always being abortion in this case Even if, for whatever reason, she said she didn't want to abort, it wouldn't matter (and it wouldn't matter to us, either) since she is not legally competent to make the decision, and that's all that matters. If we started to take legality of what was right or wrong, then that could threaten our argument that abortion is okay because it is legal! 

Pro-Choice extremism was not so sensitive to coercion, either. I can directly quote some extremists  In fact, one said that a woman brought problems onto herself that would lead to coercion--such as getting pregnant young, having parents that would threaten to kick her out, etc. if she got pregnant. Ignore the blatant irony (victim-blaming) here, this is what Pro-Choice extremists think. I was one of them. I am most definitely not proud of it. 

To Pro-Choice extremists, we say that the anti-choicers shouldn't post pictures of aborted fetuses because they're exploiting the dead. They are also doing that when they post about women who died from abortions. But we aren't exploiting the dead when we use women who have died in childbirth against the Pro-Life movement. We aren't exploiting the dead when we post that picture of the woman dead in a hotel room from a back alley abortion. To hell with the woman who died in an abortion--she chose the risks. But the woman who gave birth and died is a legitimate victim because she could be of use to our agenda. 

If we extremists had it our way, men wouldn't pay child support either. The woman chooses to give birth. Consent to sex does not mean consent to pregnancy, and that extends to men too. Children have absolutely zero right to be cared for by anyone but the state. And if we had our way, the taxes to support unwanted or abused children would come straight from the wallets of anti-choicers because if any woman made the (ridiculously awful) mistake of giving birth, clearly she was influenced in some way by anti-choicers. Plus, anti-choicers are always going about how no child is unwanted, so they should take them in. Ignore the fact that legal and available abortion has not rid the world of the problem of unwanted children or child abuse like we claim it would. Ignore children's rights post-birth. Men shouldn't have to pay child support, but complete strangers--taxpayers--should. Biological parents have a right to be protected from any possible negative consequence of conceiving or birthing a child. The state does not. That's the right to privacy, bitches. My wallet should be safe, his wallet should be safe, but yours looks mighty nice to take from. And maybe this is the most logical conclusion from "consent to sex doesn't mean consent to pregnancy." But you'd think that if we could pick and choose what we consent to, then consent to being a taxpayer wouldn't be consent to pay for someone else's kids (and now we're going to ignore the fact that sometimes things happen that we don't like when we consent to point A but that doesn't mean we can drop obligation B. It's kind of like those who say that they are Pro-Choice but when a woman consents to continue a pregnancy, she also consents to do certain things or not do certain things that would harm the child to-be-born. This makes no--logical--sense).

Personhood doesn't begin until birth. And don't ask at which point in the process of birth it becomes a person, because I don't know. I don't really think I ever did. I might have thought that the personhood began once the child (it was pretty much an appendix before birth, you understand) was completely separated--umbilical cord cut. And this might make sense. After all, until  that umbilical cord is cut, that...thing...person or not (but really not), is using her body against her will. And, I probably reasoned, no woman would ever in the history of humanity (because I know everything ever) kill a child/non-person/whatever it is after having expelled it from her body. After all, there's no threat to life or health at that point (which is the only reason in the history of ever that a woman has a later-term abortion where the fetus is viable, barring fetal defect--any other reason is an anti-choicer's fault, anyway). And since it would never ever happen ever, that seemed like a good place to draw the line. We cannot logically say that a woman cannot kill a child that is born but still connected to her body if we promote the mantra that I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want, to anyone or anything using my body or bodily resources against my consent. So again, this seemed logical, and again, it would never happen ever--until it did. A woman in Virginia killed a child that was still connected to her via the umbilical cord moments after its birth. She walked away, because a Virginia law said that a woman can pretty much do anything she wants to a child still connected to her because it's not yet an individual. Well, that's definitely not okay to me (but it might be or might have been to other extremists).

Anything that even remotely gave the fetus rights had to be opposed. If we started supporting fetal homicide laws, we'd be admitting that the fetus had some rights--more rights than tissue, more rights than an appendix. The misery of a woman who lost her child in a car accident caused by a drunk driver, or the misery of the woman whose boyfriend beat her into miscarriage could not matter. We might feel sympathetic (and indeed we did, especially if our friends miscarried, but if an anti-choicer even thought to point out that it was wrong to kill the fetus in such a circumstance or that a law should exist to protect it in any circumstance, they were in the absolute wrong--and that's pretty bad considering morality is subjective). No fetal protections. Just call it a violation of a woman's bodily autonomy--no violation on the fetus's part. After all, we don't make it a crime to violate the spleen or heart, only people. We accepted that our friends thought that they miscarried babies. We accepted that we had babies within us. We (ironically) accepted this belief. But when it came to abortion rights, it wasn't a baby. It wasn't a child. It wasn't an anything. And even if it is, it isn't. 

I think I've hounded on the extremists enough. I'd hound on any extreme, I think. Extremists are angry, hate-filled, and seldom rational. I think part of what got me out of that rut was the fact that I realized this--that I was hateful, close-minded, illogical, insensitive. I wanted to be more compassionate. I could say I was compassionate toward women in crisis pregnancies, but really, in the grand scheme of things, I only used these situations as I saw fit. They didn't deserve dignity in the sense that I later became to understand the term. Sure, I'd defend abortion rights to the death, but I didn't care who or what or how many I had to stomp on to do it. I didn't even care about convincing people that 'my side" was the clearly correct one (unless they could be intimidated into believing so). I was so right. I could think no wrong. I loved destruction--anything that could destroy the Pro-Life movement. I wanted it. Maybe not to the point of murder, but anything that would take their funding, their organization, their dignity, their free speech/protest rights, anything but their lives away, I probably supported it. And I am sorry.

Compassionate Pro-Choicers

"...{A]bortion is a human tragedy."

~Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor

It's a quote that has since stuck to me.

There probably isn't going to be too much (pfft--suuuuuure, Roni!) in this section. We'll see where it goes. I have no reason to speak so poorly of those in this category or their beliefs. While, yes, some of the beliefs are certainly similar, if not exact, to those of Pro-Choice extremists, the best Pro-Choicers I have met were not nearly as hateful as the extremists. These Pro-Choicers, what I became after being an extremist, and where I strengthened my views, actually care about women, children, society, etc. Many see abortion as a "necessary evil", or a tragedy. I saw it as the latter. Unlike before, I didn't always use others as a means to an end. I still was hateful quite often, going back to my roots. But the anger and hate was slowly subsiding and I opened my eyes to reality. The reality is that there are limitations to what one might consider "bodily autonomy", but that didn't mean that being Pro-Choice was wrong, or that we could not defend the right to bodily autonomy with regards to abortion rights.  I was reading more things that were harder to read. Forced sterilizations, eugenics, baby-selling. I was finding abortion jokes to be more and more disgusting (but still, I said them. I had to keep up the image of my former self, didn't I?). 

I feel like there are a ton of these Pro-Choicers--compassionate--out there and they deserve more credit than they get. They aren't hateful toward the unborn child/fetus. They are genuinely good people with good intentions. I know that might be hard to believe, but it is true. Ask yourself if you are a bad person. I can guarantee that someone on the opposing side thinks you are, for your beliefs, for your advocacy, for your faith. Does that make you a bad person or someone who has bad intentions? No. But the fact is that they hate you anyway.

We didn't deny the humanity of the fetus. We didn't deny that it was a life. We didn't deny that a life was being terminated by abortion. However, it (abortion) was here, and it was going to stay, whether we liked it or not. And we had a choice: We could either keep it legal and as safe as can be (without infringing too much on a woman's right to choose), or we could criminalize it and lose women along with the fetal life in the process. It came down to: Do we risk one life or two? And we chose one. There was still denial of fetal dignity, but not in the sense of the extremists. These Pro-Choicers felt a need to help women, and they went out and did it to some degree. I never had a lot of money. I played on FreeRice to "donate" to the World Food Programme, and I donated extra baby food. I even bought a woman a can of formula when she was at the store and trying to get the money from her purse. I cannot tell you how good I felt doing this. I supported a woman who chose life and surrendered her child for adoption (she didn't want to place her son, but she didn't feel like she had much other choice--her parents kicked her out, her "Christian" parents. I was disgusted, to say the least). I supported another friend having an abortion. She made it public and, of course, got called every name in the book by Pro-Lifers (and I started using that term more often, too). I told her that whether or not I agreed with her decision, I loved her and she would remain my friend anyway. She had another abortion after I became Pro-Life and I said the same thing--I loved her anyway. We are still friends.

I had a friend who was an escort to an abortion clinic. I heard stories--good and bad. They opened up my eyes to the realities of the abortion decision as well, as well as to the reality of going to an abortion clinic. I was still having conversations with Josh Brahm (name also used with permission), CB, and Clinton Wilcox. I imagine they were much more mature and welcoming than I was originally. I found compassion for women, compassion for their unborn children/fetuses and I didn't personally distinguish between unborn child and fetus. They were one and the same. Every time I read about an abortion, I felt sad. I didn't feel sad necessarily for the abortion itself, but for the reasons they came about--poverty, fear, disability, health risks... The list was endless and I thought then (and still do) that one of the best ways we can reduce the number of abortions is to address the reasons behind them. I did not support making abortion illegal at first. Then I started to think about it. What really got to me was a meeting I had with Josh Brahm and Clinton Wilcox. I will never, ever forget that day and I haven't discussed it too much either online (or in the journal I kept at the time). I hope that as I type this next blog post up, it is correct, and they can back me up.