As a disability practioner, I scratch my head at the idea that the unborn are the lives who either matter most or matter at all to a large bulk of traditional pro-lifers (not all). Witnessing this in-full bloom during the Trump administration, I had to remind myself of what it means to be holistically pro-life, not just pro-birth. The shirt below says, “You’re pro-life until they are: Black, Hispanic, Disabled, Gay, Poor, and Trans. It is just one way of many to expose the “traditional pro-life hypocrisy.” Below, I will edit part of a piece I wrote for Faith-on-View here, “https://www.faithonview.com/catholic-republican-to-catholic-democrat-which-is-more-pro-life/
It’s possible to end abortion without resorting to the actions of Jan. 6 and without backing Trump.
We can achieve this without destroying the lives of the mothers in poverty who carry the unborn babies; without destroying lives at the border and ripping children away from their parents; and without withholding health care for decades from vulnerable people.
Can we end abortion without withholding maternity and family medical leave, without flippantly handling COVID in a way that results in a million American deaths or spread deadly conspiracy theories and misinformation through right-winged media?
We can end of abortion without destroying the environment; without increasing gun violence by dissolving reasonable gun restrictions; without harming our education system resulting in harming children; and without deliberately fighting against scientific and historical facts resulting in harm and death.
Does being pro-life require withholding a living wage, elevating racism to dangerous levels, increasing the death penalty, or destroying the lives of the disabled, LGBTQ people, and their families? It doesn’t necessitate deliberately trying to harm and potentially euthanizing transgender/gender dysphoric children.
Ending abortion does not mean wreaking the witness of the Church via Trumpism, without destroying our democracy, or demonizing anyone who is unlike most Americans and most Christians/Catholics in the country. If being pro-life didn’t mean ushering in fascism and abusing people into voting for all of these evils collectively in place of fruitlessly ending abortion, then I might listen.
But the truth is, the abortion rate increased from 2018 to 2021.
The hard-political white right married to parts of the American white Church has proven over 50 years of power that they cannot abolish abortion without ushering in fascism, destroying, and dehumanizing everyone else but their kind.
In addition, the hard-right calls the basic Common Good of society socialism and communism. This is why I’m a Democrat now, why I attend a Hispanic Catholic Church which is more Democrat than Republican as most racial minority faith communities are, and why I am holistically pro-life, not just pro-birth.
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