Pro-life? Pro-choice? Could it possibly be both?

If ever there was a much-debated topic where people needed to learn to just let words mean what they say, abortion might be it.

Earlier this year, the commentary on films like Waitress and Knocked Up went in some curious and bizarre directions, reaching its nadir with Mireya Navarro’s ridiculous claim in the New York Times that “Many conservative bloggers have claimed ‘Knocked Up’ as an anti-choice movie”.

Uh, no we didn’t. We might have said the film has a “pro-life” sensibility, because it makes the pro-abortion advocates look callous and stupid while casting the decision to keep the baby in a positive light, but I don’t think anyone claimed that the film took a stance against the idea that the film’s main characters should have had the legal right to make that decision.

As with Knocked Up, so now with Juno. Lou Lumenick of the New York Post wanders into similar confusion when he writes:

Harry Forbes, the embattled head of the film office of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops . . . , in his review of “Juno” lauds what he calls the flick’s “strong pro-life message.” Really? As someone who is strongly pro-choice, I came away from this movie with exactly the opposite message. True, the pregnant title character decides against having an abortion; she decides to carry the fetus to term and to give it up for adoption. The key word here is that Juno makes a deliberative choice.

Quite so. But where’s the contradiction? “Pro-life” means you favour the continuation of a person’s life. “Pro-choice” means you favour giving people the option of continuing or terminating that life. You can be pro-choice without being pro-abortion. You can be pro-life without being anti-choice. You can be anti-abortion while being pro-euthanasia. And so on, and so on.

There are many facets to these debates, and no one is served when terms that apply to one of those facets are confused with terms that apply to other facets. Hence, in my own review of Juno, I made a point of saying that the recent films in this genre have had “implicitly pro-life — not ‘anti-choice,’ but certainly pro-life — sensibilities”. In discussions like these, a little more clarity — and complexity — would be a good thing, I think.