Violence Masquerading as “Pro Life”
The Pro Life Movement is a Death Cult
I ‘ve spent a good few years trying to figure out where the “life” part is in the “pro life” movement. They worship at the Church of the Fetus, and at the crossroads of fundamentalist Christianity and “the culture wars.” They are a movement of convenience, because “the unborn” are the perfect thing to fight for. After all, they don’t speak for themselves, they don’t make any fuss, and they make conservatives feel like they are taking action. They don’t even have to do any thinking.
They spin fierce and compelling sounding yarns until you realize that their stories are based on lies. In fact, their entire movement is based on lies, as there is nothing pro “life” about them. These people do not care if a woman dies because she could not obtain an abortion, they do not care about science (and for fuck’s sake, I can’t even find a homeschool science curriculum that doesn’t teach young earth creation…what a joke), they do not give a damn if we were raped.
Life is not what they are about, and it’s more accurate to call them pro-forced-birth. They scream at women going into a health care facility to obtain an abortion, and they scream at the escorts trying to protect these women from the “pro life” crowd. They offer solutions that sound okay at first, because there is money in selling our babies for adoption. Women of child-bearing age do not exist to help the trafficking scams of the fundamentalists, nor are they livestock bred for the consumption and profit of society.
Ironically they get pissy if asked if they are pro all life, as in are they anti capital punishment, anti war, anti military, pro education, pro birth control, anti poverty, pro gun control, or any other questions about life that show that it’s not about life, it’s about control. It makes them mad that many people are smart enough to see through their charade, and even madder when actually called out on their lies.
There are many things that the pro forced birth movement are: pro oppression, pro poverty, pro violence, pro government control of bodies, all of which are acts of violence in and of themselves. It’s a rather elaborate charade if one thinks about it. They get to have their religious beliefs dictate what the law says those already suffering oppression can do or say. But they are still not happy, because they aren’t finished with their temper tantrum, and they won’t be until they can find a way to force their will on the blue states that still recognize women as human beings.
When I was a little girl, I didn’t want to be a princess, or a fairy, or a unicorn. I also wasn’t the tomboy type who wanted to be a dinosaur, or a farm animal, or something else considered by backwards society to be masculine. I spent my childhood as a “former fetus” (a phrase these people like using), wishing my mother had aborted me. The pro life crowd prefers children born into homes where they will be abused so much they’d prefer to be dead rather than see a fetus aborted. This is a violent belief. They prefer child abuse to abortion.
There’s a very well respected within his tiny world man who claims to be pro life and a Christian on his way to heaven who forced three abortions on his adolescent daughter because apparently it’s okay to force a child to have an abortion to cover up the fact that you’ve been raping your child. I know this, because I was that little girl. I was raped, and then I was forced to have abortions, both violent violations of my body (the reason the abortions were acts of violence is that I didn’t get a choice), because the rapist didn’t want to be caught.
A truly Christian response to abortion ought to be where it’s recognized as something that is often necessary, and as such needs to be safe and legal. Such a belief allows for women to get out from under oppressive structures, to flourish in life, to not be under the control of a man who might have violated her, or stuck being a stay at home mother out of necessity rather than want. It allows women the dignity of knowing what is best for their bodies and being able to act on that knowledge.
If the pro forced birth movement were actually interested in saving lives, they would be better served by doing something useful such as helping to make access to contraception easier, advocating for appropriate sex education in schools, improving education, making sure children aren’t hungry, fighting for laws that make owning a gun difficult. Their cult isn’t about life, it’s a violent movement seeking as much control over women’s bodies as they can get.
This is the fifth in a series of feature articles about Christian thoughts about violence.
Continue the Series:
Child Sacrifice is Ancient, Child Sacrifice is Modern: Sacrificing our Children on the Altar of Guns
The Blood is the Life: Our Need to Put Down Our Weapons and Follow Jesus
