And against killing babies.
I’ve decided that it no longer makes sense to call myself “pro-life.”
This isn’t because I changed my mind about abortion. Becoming a father only intensified my belief that parents’ obligation to protect and provide for their children begins morally, and should begin legally, at conception.
But that’s no longer what the label “pro-life” means.
Spend long enough defending your “pro-life” beliefs, and you’ll eventually hear that you’re not really pro-life unless you support bike lanes, corn subsidies, and a return to the gold standard.
I exaggerate, but only slightly. Here’s a partial list of things you can’t support if you want to hold onto your “pro-life” card (according to people I’ve encountered on the internet):
When liberal abortion advocates deploy these arguments, it’s just annoying. The bigger problem is when they come from self-described pro-lifers.
In the latter context, “pro-life” means something like “committed to a holistic vision of human dignity.” It’s understandable. Plenty of well-meaning people want to create a life-affirming society and prove they aren’t merely “pro-birth.” But it doesn’t quite work out that way.
For one thing, anointing these positions as “pro-life” is a way of extending the zealous hatred one rightly feels for abortion to other, far more nuanced policy questions.
Every issue I listed above is a prudential matter on which people equally committed to the sanctity of life might disagree. You can, without contradiction, support executing a mass murderer and oppose killing an innocent baby. You can also believe that a single-payer system would deliver worse health outcomes, that cracking down on illegal migration is the best way to dismantle the cartels’ human trafficking operation, and that the IDF’s prosecution of its ongoing war fulfills the principles of jus in bello (or that it doesn’t).
You can even call your buddy “retarded” as a joke (and a protest against safetyist language policing) and still think people with actual mental disabilities have infinite value and should not be genocided in the womb.
But those who file all their political views under the “pro-life” designation can shout down all these objections and demonize anyone who raises them as a callous, unchristian murder supporter. “Stop calling yourself ‘pro-life’!” they scream at a crisis pregnancy center volunteer who thinks Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense.
This semantic creep has a still worse knock-on effect, however, in that it ends up reducing “pro-life” to a mere synonym for “empathetic.” And Democrats have cornered the market on empathy. When it comes to claiming victim status, the unborn are at a distinct disadvantage, being the only ones who cannot speak up for themselves. Other supposedly marginalized groups, all firmly ensconced within the Democratic coalition, flood the zone with their own laments.
As a result, the “pro-life” label, repurposed as a “human dignity respecter” merit badge, functions as the thin end of a very blue wedge on a huge suite of policies. Then, once you start voting Democrat on a few issues, it’s not long before you start accepting more and more of the party’s logic—and its platform. The joke’s cruel punchline is that in the end, that includes drifting further and further left…on abortion.
Large majorities of black Americans (including leaders like Al Sharpton) used to oppose abortion vigorously. But the longer they vote for Democrats, the more pro-choice they become.
Over time, they may even stop treating other “life issues” as secondary. Opposing abortion becomes just one more equally weighted box on the scorecard. A progressive Christian who chants “Black Lives Matter” and “Free Palestine” but supports legal abortion could conceivably claim to be more “pro-life” than a MAGA evangelical who celebrated the Dobbs decision.
In 2019, The New York Times published an op-ed with the headline “Pregnancy Kills. Abortion Saves Lives.” The implication was obvious: if you were really pro-life, you’d want to keep abortion legal—not just for life-threatening pregnancies, of course, but in all cases.
Most pro-lifers recoiled in disgust, but the term itself is inherently vulnerable to this kind of subversion. The Times merely skipped ahead to what I fear may be “pro-life’s” natural endpoint. And if my own experience is anything to judge by, the term is drifting further in that direction with each passing year.
When used in this way, the term no longer describes an actual coalition. Instead, it actively undermines that coalition’s unity. It’s true that multiple issues can be interrelated. I think the Catholic Church is correct in identifying abortion, contraception, assisted suicide, in vitro fertilization, and gestational surrogacy as fruits of the same poisoned tree. But anyone who has truly grasped the enormity of our civilization’s industrial-scale infanticide should be willing to join with just about anyone to fight abortion.
We can’t afford to gatekeep. I’ve protested and sidewalk counselled with gay atheists who want to abolish the police. We agreed on basically nothing except that abortion is murder. But that was enough. We accomplished a lot together. And none of them ever called me a fake pro-lifer.
The term “pro-life” was coined to signify nothing more or less than opposition to abortion. Those who would dilute the term’s power by stretching it beyond its proper meaning do a disservice to the unborn.
Fortunately, there’s a simple corrective: just call yourself “anti-abortion.”
This label would provide some much-needed clarity while allowing for uncomfortable disagreements. One could theoretically be anti-abortion and support transgenderism or a white ethnostate (though not IVF except under very limited conditions, since the procedure nearly always involves the intentional destruction or indefinite freezing of human embryos).
At the same time, it’s possible to be anti-abortion and still be open to certain practical compromises. It’s better for an eight-week ban with rape and incest exceptions to stay on the books than for a six-week ban with no exceptions to get overturned in a referendum. It’s also perfectly legitimate to take a “personally opposed, but…” stance on IVF if campaigning against it would hand the election to a pro-abortion radical. Politicians who accept such compromises (and the voters who back them) can still credibly claim to be anti-abortion.
It’s generally unwise to assign yourself the negative in a debate. But when the affirmative form of your argument starts collapsing in on itself, it might be time to trade in a thousand “Yes, buts” and “Yes, ands” for a single, resounding “No.”
The American Mind is a publication of the Claremont Institute, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, dedicated to restoring the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life. Interested in supporting our work? Gifts to the Claremont Institute are tax-deductible.
