An essay from my reader P.R.  - Dot Calm

Pro-Life, or Just Pro-Birth?

My son, A., has always delighted in word play. The first time I referred to someone as "talking out of both sides of his mouth," A. went around holding his upper and lower lips together in the middle and trying to talk. Someone who was said to be "talking through his hat" earned me two weeks of silly talk through the cowboy hat A. held over his face for every conversation.

A. and I worked hard for our local democratic party after vowing that we could not wake up on 3 November with the knowledge that we had not done everything in our power to turn our country away from its descent into oligarchy. It was critical to us, and to A.'s future, that we give our all to halt the steady destruction of the middle class. As we listened, read, and watched the campaign, we both became increasingly conscious of the pertinence of those two phrases: talking through your hat and talking out of both sides of your mouth.

The pro-choice/pro-life controversy swirls around us daily, yet it is a fundamentally flawed discussion when couched in these two terms. George Bush repeatedly declared that we need to make our country a "pro-life" country. The so-called pro-life or right to life movement has focused single-mindedly on the issue and has apparently amassed the power to turn out the vote on this issue alone.

But what is the issue? Who is talking out of both sides of their mouth? Who is just talking through a hat?

The real controversy lies between the advocates for life and the advocates for birth. Once you release your lips in the middle and pull that hat from in front of your face, the issues become clear. Pro-life means the whole life, not just the birth event.

Regardless of when you say life truly begins, our lives do NOT end with our exit from our mothers' wombs. The moment human children are born, they assume the risks and rewards of human endeavor. Each living human being is a life which, at various stages, requires all kinds of support, encouragement, and love. Therefore, a pro-life stance must include favoring the entire lifetime of a human, not just the time that ends at the moment of birth.

Pro-birth advocates are relieved, by their own definition of their cause, of any responsibility for life after it is born. The great majority of pro-birth advocates support the death penalty and the dismantling of social security; they oppose welfare support to children and families. Pro-birth advocates ignore or approve of corporate welfare and tax cuts for the wealthy that often have a negative impact on our society's weakest members. Many pro-birth advocates openly and/or secretly encourage the murder of people with whom they disagree: the murder of women's health care providers who offer abortion options is just one example. In summary, the advocates of birth are blind to the hypocrisy of their position: singling out only the birth event and claiming that to be all and everything there is to life.

Conversely, pro-life advocates are driven by their definition of life to support causes that aim to support the most vulnerable members of our society: social security, pension funding for old age, universal health care, and welfare support for children, the disabled, and the elderly. True pro-life advocates respect those who hold different views and rarely kill or maim those with whom they disagree. In sum, true pro-life advocates look across the human life span and attempt to stitch together the social fabric in such a way that, as individual fortunes wax and wane, the rest of society is there to shoulder the risk.

If you believe that being for life is being for birth, you're talking through your hat. Why? Because talking through your hat means you don't know what you're talking about. If you believe that you favor life but support movements that systematically destroy the social fabric that we all need to survive, then you're talking out of both sides of your mouth. That's because talking out of both sides of your mouth means that you only promote the part of the cause that's convenient for you, ignoring the rest. In other words, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth when you advocate only for the birth event and ignore or systematically destroy what we need for lifelong survival as individuals and as a society.

I'm pro-life, and so is A. And we're proud to say that we are working very hard to make this country a true pro-life society.