(LifeSiteNews) – As news surfaced of Roe v. Wade’s apparent imminent demise, left-wing activists recycled the tired slander that anti-abortion activists aren’t actually pro-life. Conservatives, the argument goes, are merely pro-birth or anti-choice as they don’t care about the children abandoned to late-stage capitalism.
This narrative is not only false, but it also relies on an all-encompassing burden of proof that would obliterate any notion that the left is “pro-choice.”
Democrats brand Republicans as “anti-choice” while their party pushes regulations on nearly every aspect of Americans’ lives – literally down to their straw types and cup sizes. And in recent years, leading Democrats have proposed taking over sizable portions of the economy, mandating vaccines, forcing doctors to perform procedures they morally oppose, and demanding that taxpayers fund elective abortions.
Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal, and other Democratic proposals include sweeping controls and unintended consequences that should embarrass any liberal who claims to champion “choice.” Indeed, former President Obama’s legacy was marred by the broken promise that “you can keep your doctor” under his behemoth health care reform.
Relying on a vague political concept of “life,” pro-abortion Democrats try dragging their entire policy agenda into a debate that should be focused on science and the limits of privacy. The term “pro-life” simply means protecting against direct affronts to innocent life – which Democrats can’t even bring themselves to do.
Instead, they assert putatively “pro-life” arguments about externalities, or the unintended costs of private entities engaging in market transactions. But if liberals want to honestly examine the fallout of individual “choices,” they shouldn’t stop with, for example, the impact of deregulation on wages. They should contemplate the mangled organs and severed limbs on abortionists’ medical trays — or maybe Gianna Jessen’s cerebral palsy, which she claims resulted from her mother’s botched abortion.
These are the types of results Americans get when they follow left-wing billionaires and corporations rather than free market ideologues in the conservative movement.
As liberals like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have sought to prevent human life, pro-life charities are rushing to provide material and financial relief that would support it. Texas, where the Roe case originated, recently passed $100 million in spending to help women in crisis pregnancies. That state is also the site of charities like LoveLine, which provided nearly $150,000 of material and financial assistance within months of launching. More broadly, Texas’s roughly 200 pregnancy help centers provided an estimated $33 million in materials and services in 2019. Nevermind the millions in relief provided by the Catholic Church, pregnancy centers across the U.S., and other conservative organizations focused on helping children.
It’s absurd to suggest that a right to life implies more bureaucracy. But for the sake of debate, Republicans and pro-lifers can point to empirical evidence that central planning harms human lives through rationing and job loss. Sen. Bernie Sanders even admitted that his energy transition would “end unemployment” only after shedding industry jobs – no doubt creating potential hardship for working families. The economic consequences of Democratic policy appear to be impacting born children more specifically as President Biden’s economy includes mothers who have difficulty obtaining baby formula.
Perhaps liberals’ best challenge to the “pro-life” label was former President Trump’s treatment of immigrant minors brought across the border by smugglers or their family members. But the hollowness of that argument became relatively clear once a Democratic administration confronted the realities of the border crisis.
On immigration, though, Republicans don’t even need to paint themselves as cornered by legal complications (as the Biden administration also did) like Flores. As long as they’re not allowing border agents to dismember migrants and crush their skulls, their pro-life positions aren’t hypocritical. Abortion and migrant detention aren’t even comparable in either nature or degree. Only one of those involves actual death resulting from direct physical harm — the likes of which would make Guantanamo interrogators blush.
What exactly can’t Republicans justify if Democrats support surgical abortions for economic reasons?
Paradoxically, the left demands a “pro-life” framework that necessarily entails the life-ending barbarity of second and third trimester abortions. Only a movement like this would describe dismemberment as “care” while labeling the Hyde Amendment, which prevents taxpayer money from flowing to abortion, as discrimination or a barrier to freedom. And while liberals brandish an Orwellian concept of a “forced pregnancy” or “forced birth,” Christian business owners face penalties — even jail time — for refusing to support same-sex ceremonies.
The “anti-abortion isn’t pro-life” argument is too often a haphazard form of dismissal. If abortion supporters were genuinely open to a philosophy in which protecting unborn children implied support for the born, then they’d join President Biden in making the damning admission that both are “children.”