Who Can Call Himself Pro-Life?

(image via Pixabay)

The whole pro-life argument is that every human life is equally valuable. It is wrong to discriminate against a person on the basis of size, age or location. A baby in the womb is worth just as much as a baby outside the womb, a baby eight days old is worth as much as a baby eight days before viability, a baby girl killed in a sex-selective abortion is a victim of a crime the same as a grown woman killed in a bar fight.

Well, guess what? It works the other way, too.

If a political candidate is claiming to be pro-life (lately), but is a sexual assailant who boasts about sexual assault and is awaiting trial for rape, that candidate is lying. And defending that candidate by saying that sexual assault is a lesser crime than abortion is giving the lie to your pro-life argument. You’re saying that affronts against the dignity of 35-week-old girls will not be tolerated, but affronts to the dignity of thirteen-year-old rape victims or beauty pageant contestants will. That some lives are actually more valuable than others, you just have the opposite opinion to a pro-choice person of whose lives should be on the pedestal and whose lives should be disvalued.

Now, at this point, somebody usually shouts “but Hillary Clinton defended a rapist!” Well, first of all, the constitution requires that rapists also get defense attorneys who make a vigorous effort to defend them when they go to trial, just like everybody else. Secondly, everybody already knows that Clinton is not pro-life. Everybody knows. Steel Magnificat is not endorsing Clinton. But CLINTON IS NOT PRETENDING TO BE PRO-LIFE. The other candidate is. Right now, for the moment. He tends to waver quite a bit. It’s the person claiming to be pro-life whose position needs to be examined, not the one who never claimed to be.

He’s lying about being pro-life, and so are all those who claim that bragging about sexual assault, sexual harassment and so forth, are perfectly fine as long as he’s going to fight abortion. His is not a consistent argument. Neither is anything else he says, but that one isn’t either.

Either everyone has dignity or nobody does.

Either you’re pro-life because everyone has intrinsic dignity from conception until natural death, or you’re just pro-fetus because you think their dignity is a special arbitrary case. If that’s the argument you want to claim, fine. But it isn’t pro-life.

No major party candidate is pro-life, this time around. Vote down ticket, vote third party or vote based on something else. You’re just belying the entire pro-life argument if you claim there’s a pro-life option.