In a much-discussed post, blogger Libby Anne describes how she began to understand that the purported goal of the Pro-Life movement, saving unborn lives from the moment of conception, does not appear to be their actual goal. One of the problems with the movement is that it is married to a religiously-motivated sexual ethic that has more to do with ensuring that people have sex their god approves of (and no other kind) than it does in valuing human life.
I recall the prescription for an abortion-free society offered by Pro-Life groups as something like this: 1. Do not have sex until you're married. 2. Once you're married, all sex should be procreative because if you have any other kind of sex it means you're rejecting God's gift for life, which is a birth-control mindset. You should always want children. 3. If you're someone who wants to prevent babies (not an option in some Christian worldviews), you should use birth control methods that don't cause abortions, and if you accidentally get pregnant anyway, then you must either raise the baby or give it up for adoption.
Practical Problems
I suppose, in the theocratic mind-control utopia that the Religious Right imagines to be possible, this would indeed be a recipe for basically eliminating abortions. Even taking into account the fuzzy cases (pregnancy that poses an immediate threat to the life of the mother, for instance), abortions would still be quite drastically reduced if everyone obeyed the abstinence code as outlined above. The problem is that this recipe is never, ever, ever, ever going to catch on in a free society. It is not working. People want to have sex. People want to have sex with people they aren't married to. People, both married and not, want to have sex that won't result in babies. Pro-Life organizations have been doing the scare tactics and the guilt-tripping about sex for as long as I can remember, but abortion is still happening. I'm convinced that attempting to push the abstinence model as the one and only solution to abortion guarantees that the Pro-Life movement will fail.
So while the hysterical, sinister virgins* in charge of the Catholic church, and the Evangelicals who increasingly lap up their every word as they help helm the Pro-Life movement, push this useless agenda, fetuses die. On the other hand, researchers who actually care about what works are showing how to slash abortion rates through widely available contraceptives. Pro-Lifers who are sincere in their belief that abortion is a tragic killing should be red-faced at their organizations' willful indifference to the ongoing deaths of fetuses as they try to turn the cause into a culture-wars battle that is doomed to fail. Even if you feel that abstinence until marriage, and unlimited baby-making thereafter, is the only moral model for sexual behavior, is this more important than the deaths of fetuses that are going to continue to happen until your worldview catches on, if it ever does? If freely available contraception can reduce abortion rates by more than 50%, is it still worth opposing because, to you, it represents sexual immorality?
Look also at the way this sex-control ideology has managed to spin birth control and Plan B access into an abortion issue despite a lack of evidence that hormonal birth control pills actually prevent zygote implantation. Plan B works by inhibiting ovulation, and that's a win for Pro-Lifers, since a last-minute stab at contraception should be seen as better than the abortion that otherwise would happen. Yet Pro-Lifers will continue to rage against Plan B's existence because they either don't understand that it doesn't cause abortions, or they don't care and they're just angry that women are escaping the unwanted consequences of Non-God-Approved-Sex.
Especially revealing is when masturbation, gay sex, and straight non-PIV sex get shafted in the Pro-Life worldview, despite the fact that these have nothing to do with potential harm to embryos or fetuses. Opposition to these kinds of sex were a given in the materials I used to read; these acts were portrayed as being somehow connected to the vaguely-defined "culture of death" we supposedly live in. Pro-Lifers may say that promoting abstinence reduces unwanted pregnancy, which reduces abortion, but what the hell is the justification for opposing these sex acts where pregnancy isn't a risk? Oh, hey, it's religious and it has nothing to do with protecting life. Shocking.
*as Christopher Hitchens so tactfully described them
The Anti-Birth-Control Mindset
Although my family wasn't part of the Quiverfull movement exactly, there was a definite opposition to birth control (I'm one of 6 siblings) and many of the Pro-Life and "Christian living" materials I used to read asserted the theological wrongness of non-procreative sex. The viewpoint was something like this: "God controls life. If he wants a [human] life to exist, it is not the place of any person to interfere with the existence of that life either by preventing it or killing it, and the act of having sex is tantamount to giving God permission to work his life-giving powers. Birth control is trying to tell God 'No, we don't want the blessing of life' and since it's putting your own wisdom above God's, it's sinful." Due to the Biblical literalism that made it mandatory to trust God to take care of you no matter what, there was also a notion that no matter how many children you had, God would intervene so that you would not go hungry or homeless.
The most obvious pitfall of this kind of thinking is that people do go hungry. And they do become homeless. Even Christians. Even Christians with a lot of children. Circumstances are everything and faith is irrelevant. Ignoring your best judgment in family planning because of a blind-faith insistence that nothing could possibly go wrong if you have 12 kids is nothing short of stupid. Using your religious and political clout to try to deny people access to birth control is nothing short of evil.
The other thing that strikes me as weird about this theological setup is the veneration of a perfectly material and mundane biological function, conception, as a literal, miraculous act of God. The idea of interfering with procreation raises hackles in ways that other types of "tampering with nature" do not (who objects to using an umbrella even though God supposedly controls the weather?). I can only look at it as body worship, a deification of the reproductive organs. It's assuming that just because a sperm and an egg are doing their job, they're doing God's job. Procreation is seen as mystically powerful, as if blocking conception could trigger an avalanche of disastrous butterfly effects that will ruin God's plan forever. There is no free will here, only submission to your bodily functions. That's the way God wants it.
What the Pro-Life Movement Could Be
What if the Pro-Life movement, as a whole, decided to try to figure out what can actually stop abortion (hint: Laws are not the only factor, and may not even be the most important factor in some regions)? What if they dropped the hand-wringing about what sex God doesn't like? What if they helped make birth control accessible? What if they stepped beyond the Crisis Pregnancy Center and actually went into the hellholes of poverty that the anti-birth-control worldview may have helped create? What if they stopped lying about sex, lying about STDs, lying about pregnancy and motherhood and what a fetus thinks and just dealt with the issues honestly?
I think I could respect them then. I might actually believe that human lives were their #1 priority.
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