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From Pro-Life to Pro-Choice [1]

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Date: 2022-10-07

This actually works as the TL:DR summary

They got me with the eugenics argument.

The Pro-Life movement is very good at what it does. What it does changes over time, and in the 80s and early 90s what it did was not the same as what it does now. In the 80s and early 90s, it didn’t feel it had the momentum it needed, so it worked very hard at outreach and used a lot of different ideas to draw people in. There was the religious argument — the one I was familiar with was the evangelical argument about how fetuses have souls and are ensouled at conception, and if you abort a fetus you are killing a human with a soul. There were also arguments for other religions — they use them as much but they had them on hand if needed.

There were various moral arguments, all of them playing on some fear of the emptiness or heartlessness of modern science or modern medicine. That abortions were being used as birth control and contributing to an overall callousness and disregard for life, that it was use as a convenience, that kind of thing. The idea of medicine as a big business was definitely there, with the argument that the medical profession supported abortions only because it made them so much money.

They drew me in with the eugenics argument.

The eugenics argument was an attempt to conflate abortion with eugenics. Specifically, they conflated abortion with weeding out people who carry undesirable genetic traits. They pointed out that the founder of Planned Parenthood was very pro-eugenics. Then they pointed out that aborting a child after running genetic tests to detect abnormalities (something that wasn’t really possible in the late 80s/early 90s, but apocalyptic speculation helps stitch the narrative together) would be, in fact, eugenics.

That was the argument they used with me. On top of that, there was a film called the Silent Scream that claimed to show an abortion in progress. The story that was came with the film was that an abortion doctor recorded an ultrasound of an abortion in process and after seeing the film walked away from it all and never performed abortions again. There has been a lot of criticism about whether the film is accurate, or even real, but I will say that it looked real at the time, and it shook me.

So I signed on. I was “Pro Life.” And if you’d told me, at the time, that I didn’t really care about human life, I was only interested in controlling women, I would have assumed you were arguing in bad faith because you couldn’t accept that you were supporting murder.

I was an interesting mess of contradictions in college, because I was mostly anti-authoritarian but I joined Students for Life and found myself surrounded by some of the most conservative people on campus. I mostly didn’t agree with them on anything, but we agreed on this one point and I set aside my distaste, and wound up getting elected vice president of the group which was uncomfortable and weird. We wound up not really doing much, which in hindsight I’m kind of relieved about, but we did wind up going to a few of the big rallies and we did get guest experts and lecturers coming in from time to time to help train us to be “effective spokespeople for the Pro Life cause.”

And this is the thing that those of you who weren’t around back then might find weird: there were more people like me — that is, people associated with punk, and indie music, and other counter-culture scenes — than you’d think based on who the most visible leaders were. Also, there was a time when we were being actively recruited. We weren’t a majority by any means, and there was never a chance we would be, but we were definitely pushed front and center in order to counter the criticisms levied against the “cause.” When they were accused of being anti-women, they would bring up the organization Feminists for Life, which had a lot of quotes from Susan B. Anthony (at least, they claimed to be from her) talking about the evils of abortion. When they were accused of being anti-Semitic, they replied with Jewish Doctors Against Abortion.

I once went to one of those rallies they had on the Mall in DC and stumbled across a guy carrying a sign that said AN ANARCHIST AGNOSTIC AGAINST ABORTION and we both sort of nodded at each other because we were obviously not there because we enjoyed the company. So yeah, counter culture was there, for a while, until it wasn’t.

But.

You look at it in the rear view mirror and you notice things you didn’t see when you were there up close. Like… hey, all of those kinda-leftish groups were given tables at all the events, and allowed to pass out their pamphlets, and were pointed out whenever someone criticized them for being sexist, or racist, or anti-Semitic… but the sexists and racists and the anti-Semites were given the center stage. You never saw the anti-abortion feminist be a keynote speaker at these things, but Pat Fucking Buchanan sure was. I was at a rally at the Mall in DC and I saw a guy right at the stage, right in front of all the media cameras, with a sign proclaiming that abortion was a JEWISH PLOT BY JEWISH DOCTORS TO KILL WHITE CHRISTIAN BABIES and not a single person there tried to haul him away. The media loved it, obviously. And looking back on it I guess the organizers did too.

Segue — I took a religion class at my college and the teacher was a Muslim who had been one of the students involved in the rebellion in Iran that overthrew the Shah. He didn’t talk about it a lot, but for one class he did, and it was riveting. The thing he said that stuck with me was that there were the students, who believed, really believed that the Shah was corrupt and that they needed to end that corruption, and then there were old rich men who paid for everything. And the students did all the work, but at the end of the revolution, the students didn’t have anything, because the old rich men had the money. And in the end, it wasn’t the students who chose the Ayatollah.

End segue, other than to note that a lot movements go exactly the same way, and Pro Life was definitely one of them. There were a lot of people my age who I generally didn’t agree with on anything but I did know, just because I knew them, that they weren’t there as a pretense to anything, but because they thought they were saving babies. And there were rich old men who let them go right on thinking that as they built their own personal empires, the fruits of which we all see today.

But back to me. I stopped being part of the Pro Life movement in the early 90s when I tried to answer a question I’d never answered before.

All through my time as Pro Life I’d heard the accusation that the Pro Life position was inherently anti-woman and treated women as chattel and second class citizens. And mostly I’d roll my eyes every time I heard it because I knew I wasn’t involved in Pro Life for those reasons. But I never took the next step and tried to figure out how a society that banned abortion would prevent women from being second class citizens. Looking back, a lot of the literature you were given was very much focused on the fight now, and there was very little theorycrafting about the better future they wanted and the implications of what it would be like.

I started thinking about it not because of a conversation I had, but because of one I overheard.

I was sitting in a restaurant in Charlottesville eating lunch with a friend and we overheard these two women having a very loud conversation — the kind of conversation you don’t intend to eavesdrop on but it’s hard not to — and at one point it turned to the topic of abortion. One woman was talking about an argument she had with some guy who claimed the Pro Life wasn’t about making women second class citizens, and she said “so I said to him ‘yeah, how does that work exactly?’ And he got mad because he couldn’t think of an answer.”

(or something like that. I may be misquoting slightly, it’s been decades)

My friend was rolling his eyes as the conversation went on, but I was stuck on that comment. How did that work, exactly? I’d never considered it. So I did. I considered it a lot. I tried to figure out how you’d have a society where abortion was illegal but women weren’t second class citizens.

The only scenario I could think of was one where both men and women were given contraceptives that had to be deliberately removed when both parties wanted a kid. That was science fiction stuff at the time (and does show up in a series of science fiction books written by Lois McMaster Bujold called the Vorkosigan Saga) and it was certainly not something the Pro Life movement supported, there was a lot of opposition even to basic contraceptives there.

With that scenario both technically impossible and not something the Pro Lifers would agree with even if it was possible, I was left with… nothing. I was forced to admit I was wrong — it didn’t matter that I wasn’t trying to make women second class citizens, the thing was that passing abortion laws would make women second class citizens whether I wanted them to be or not.

A woman cannot be an equal citizen in this country if they are subject to laws and penalties that apply to them and them alone because it is based on a biological function only they have. No law outlawing abortion could affect a man and a woman equally, because only the woman is forced to carry the child to term. That was the conclusion I reached, and that was when I became Pro Choice. Even though I still believed that life began at conception, I could no longer oppose the idea of legal abortion.

It’s funny and a little sad: for years before that moment, I would hear various politicians say “I personally oppose abortion, but I support a woman’s right to choose” and all that time I thought those politicians were spineless, unwilling to just commit to one side or the other. All this time it turns out they’d just gone through the same thing.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/7/2127637/-From-Pro-Life-to-Pro-Choice

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