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Pro-life or anti-abortion

Steadfast Feminist.  Natalie Dulka
Steadfast Feminist. Natalie Dulka

I am pro-life but I am not anti-abortion. Yes, there is a difference. I identify as pro-life because I believe that we need stricter gun laws in order to protect the lives of the people in our nation. I believe that we need to do away with capital punishment and that choice war is never justified because it is not our place to choose who lives and who dies. I am pro-life because I believe in the importance and weight that each human life has. However, I also believe in a woman’s right to choose. I believe that the choices people make regarding their bodies (and the fetuses within them) are nobody’s business but their own. I am pro-life but I am not anti-abortion.

There is an assumption in our society that what is moral is whatever is written in the Bible. There is an adherence to rules and expectations laid out in a 2000-year-old book. An entire sect of people believe that shooting up a Planned Parenthood is righteous. We exist in a culture that condones violence when done in the name of the Christian God. When a man shoots up a women’s clinic because he’s a staunch opponent to abortion, he is lauded for his bravery by people who see him as a religious activist instead of a religious extremist.

We fly off the handle at the actions of religious extremists when the perpetrator holds any religious belief but our own. If a Muslim suicide bomber kills a busfull of people, it’s a heinous act of religious terrorism that will not be tolerated. But, when a Christian takes the lives of innocents in a Planned Parenthood, we brush it off as just another day in America. Pro-lifers across the nation shake their heads and shrug at the shootings that have become a weekly occurrence in our country. They assure their social media followers that they’ll be praying for the victims and do little else to stop the violence that takes countless lives. However, this apathy for the taking of lives stops when the lives in question are still in utero. These people who fancy themselves “pro-life” have nothing to say when three are killed and nine are injured in one man’s quest to save the “baby parts.” We have created a hypocritical echo chamber for conservatives in our society and it needs to stop.

The ideology that abortion is murder and that all women who get abortions are murderers is not only extremely archaic but also disregards the rights and feelings of those women. When we ostracize these women who receive abortions but excuse the fatal actions of mass murderers, we are telling the story that one unborn, half-developed child is more important than the lives of many adults. When we justify the shootings by young white men at schools and universities, saying that it was mental health or daddy issues or sexual frustration, we take away the weight that the lives taken once had. If these people harass young women for getting abortions but not young men for buying guns, are they really pro-life or are they just anti-abortion?

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