Pro-Life Politics Are A Complete Farce
If you want people to have children, you have to provide a world worth living in.
I’ve had this concept in my head for a few days but lacked time to sit down and write it. A Tweet last Friday that was reposted on BlueSky (the much healthier alternative to Twitter, even though it’s meant rebuilding my audience) caught my attention and gave me the thread I needed to pull this together.
From WBZ in Boston comes this report:
Arlington is one of those upper middle-class, overwhelmingly white enclaves outside of Boston whose racism is deeply buried but never dead, and we’ll come back to that aspect later, but this entire incident is perfectly inclusive of the politics around the “pro-life” movement. The movement decries a declining birth rate in America and abortion access in any form, despite the former being about economics and the latter being about healthcare. They want pregnant women to be forced to give birth, but not to receive any help for prenatal care. This includes the disingenuous “pregnancy crisis centers” which hand women pamphlets about all the assistance “they” provide—assistance which actually comes in the form of the government’s ragged safety net. The same safety net, of course, which the politicians backed by the pro-life movement have worked tirelessly for my entire lifetime to destroy. There is, of course, the kicker here: when the child is born, the “pro-life” activists are nowhere to be found, not once, for a woman who was unable or talked out of getting an abortion. All of these barriers are in place to having a healthy environment to give birth to and raise a child. It’s basically become impossible for anyone but the well-off to willingly have children. It’s eugenics by policy preference.
Those deliberate actions, enough on their own to properly kill off a nation’s future, do not even include the abortion bans being enacted in Republican-run states that criminalize actions such as treatment of ectopic pregnancies or miscarriages.
The procedure, medically speaking, is nearly identical in all three instances, and so the “pro-lifers”—with all of the unearned confidence that comes from believing you are God’s special messengers—treat any use of that procedure as murder.
Ectopic pregnancies are nothing more than cells that will not develop into a human being. It’s almost like a cancer. A miscarriage is a common occurrence, and extremely painful both physically and emotionally—a woman who wants to be a mother and loses the fetus inside of them. It’s a child that never was and never will be. My mother struggled for years to give birth to siblings for me. She told me when I was older that she had two miscarriages in the two years following my birth and then they stopped trying for a couple of years because she couldn’t take losing another. Proper treatment of either of those dangerous conditions is the law in about a dozen states, because legislators on the right have universally stuck rusty forks into their brain stems and are incapable of doing anything but parrot the same mantra that has passed from Jerry Falwell to Sarah Palin to Virginia Blackburn to MTG and Lauren Boebert like some sort of faux-religious tapeworm covered in shit. Banning treatment of miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy because “hurr durr, the clump of cells can just be put into the uterus and grow into a beautiful child” (yes, a white male Christian legislator in Missouri uttered this collection of words, minues the hurr durr), ultimately leads to infertility and death—the furthest thing from being “pro-life.”
Having stated all of that, now let’s wind it back to the beginning. Imagine that you and your spouse want to have a child, or children, and you do the math and decide, It’ll be tight at times, but we can make it through, and we really want a child. You give birth, raise your child and work from home for a time, but then you have to go back to work, and your child needs to start preschool. Preschool isn’t a basic right or a government provided item in America, the Land of Privatizing Everything™. It has to be paid for, like everything else, but you make it work. Then, because the preschool has too many poors or minorities, the city it’s in wants to enact a staggering fee for it to use public parks.
Public. Parks.
Those are already paid for by taxpayers, including the preschools and day care facilities. That’s the whole point of a public space. The people who complain about it being too loud are the same people trying to ban books about Black people from your school district—stifled, miserable, angry people who hurt those with less because they can, not because there’s a point to it. All this story is, at its core, is people who want to make the barriers higher and pull up the ladder so only their kids, the privileged Charlottes and Hamiltons of the world, can enjoy the space that everyone pays for. So imagine being a parent whose child goes to preschool in an Arlington or a Malibu because the parent works nearby and it’s a quality place, and then being told your weekly costs are being jacked up because the city is charging you an additional fee to use something your tax dollars already pay for. The end result is a parent dropping out of the workforce, or a child who doesn’t get a good preschool, and therefore falls behind. There’s also the third result, which is simply prospective parents looking at stories like this and deciding they cannot afford to bring a life into this miserable country.
Pro-lifers are one of the most morally craven and useless activist groups in the country. We need to call them on their bullshit and make being a parent an easier decision.
Completely agree.