What It Means to be Pro-Life.

The Pro-life vs Pro-choice argument is something that has been going on for generations and will continue to grow. As a Christian, it is typical to believe I have the same views on Abortion as the rest of my fellow believers, but that is not the case. I am Pro-life. I am anti-abortion but I am not anti-women. That seems to be the new perspective you are either pro-baby or pro-women and can’t be both but I am here to tell you that you can. My views on this issue are very unorthodox but I am proud of them.

First of all, Pro-Life is not limited to just babies. Pro-life also qualifies as being anti-death penalty, anti-euthanasia, and fighting against anything else that takes away life or diminishes the quality of one’s life. There is nothing that irks me more than the hypocrisy in many Republicans ideas that include “fighting for life” for the sole purpose of putting on a good face but then fighting to keep the death penalty alive in states all across our nation.  These conservative politicians have no issue promoting a cause like Pro-life because it prohibits killing babies in the womb but have no problem killing a full grown human? Give me a break. Politicians will never overturn Roe v Wade because it gets them votes, it get’s those deep blooded right wings fired up at the idea but if that law got abolished what else would there be to vote for a conservative, their 2nd amendment views? Their trickle-down-economy tactics? I don’t think so. Conservatives want to push this pro-life movement but then somehow be anti-social programs. Hmmm. How do you expect these women to take care of babies without help? We want to tell women “Hey you made a mistake and now this baby is the consequence so have fun with that.” That is inhuman and completely unethical. Conservatives are only pro-life when the baby is inside the womb, once it is born it suddenly seems like an abuse of the system. If they actually cared about the life being carried inside the mother’s womb, they’d be fighting for more sex education, birth control access, and programs to help sustain a good life for the mother and the baby, NOT abandoning the cause as soon as the baby takes its first breath.

I do not like abortion, I never have and I never will but if I want to sit here and preach about being Pro-life, I need to do just that. Making Abortion illegal is not going to solve the issue. Women will get desperate and try to do these procedures on their own or through back-alley, unqualified, “doctors”. This will lead to the killing of babies AND the harm of the mother,  with potential death from botched abortions. Now, we are taking two lives instead of one so abolishing this law is not the answer to this equation. We need to make birth control more accessible, we need to better educate kids AND adults on sex, and add some restrictions to Roe v Wade. Here’s where it get’s tricky.

Roe v Wade has no limit to when an abortion can be performed. So hypothetically speaking, you could have an abortion a week before your due date. A baby can easily survive outside the womb at that stage so I feel sick to my stomach knowing that. Women typically know they are pregnant after the first month and up until the first month the fetus is literally still a clump of cells. The real question is “When does it actually become life?” Well, no one is really sure when a baby receives its soul but what we do know are the stages of development. I am not going to take the time to list out the week by week growth of the human fetus but a quick search on google will clarify all of that information. This is a situation where everyone feels compelled to state why it should and shouldn’t be legal. All these “What if” scenarios but the reality is that the largest percent all abortions (27%) are because women weren’t ready or it was poor timing and while I do not think we should completely criminalize abortion, there needs to be some accountability on the women’s (and men’s) end. We need to start accepting the fact that having unsafe sex is the mistake, not the baby. We need to stop shaming the women for getting pregnant. We need to start making the Fathers a more prominent aspect of whether or not that baby will make it to full term or have it’s life cut short because the truth is, the baby is 50% his DNA and he has just as many rights to keep it as the women do.

Abortion is taking the life from the innocent, taking a child from the safest place it will ever be. The way to end this is to support the women in need not making them feel as if they are less regardless of the choice they make. Do I hope that abortion will one day be something of the past? Yes, but not in a way that is going to cause more harm than good. I think this will be a slow process, one that may take generations but in a situation where you want the quality of life and the quantity to multiply it is difficult to just let it take its course. All I want is for the babies and their mothers to have fulfilling, healthy, and sustainable lives and for that to be true abortion cannot be the solution but it can’t be a crime either.

Thank You.- Lex.