An Open Letter To The Forced-Birth Movement–From A Former Anti-Abortion Liberal (VIDEO)


To The “Leadership” Of The “Pro-Life” Movement:

For most of the time from around 2004 to 2011, I was one of you. I opposed abortion, except in cases of rape and incest. But recent events have convinced me that all your talk about protecting the sanctity of human life is nothing more than hot air. I now believe that your hand-wringing and pearl-clutching about the sanctity of life is nothing more than a backdoor attempt to erode the right to privacy. That is something with which I cannot, and will not, identify.


You started in 2009 when your buddies in the Oklahoma state legislature tried to set up a database containing information about every abortion performed in the state. It would have contained the mother’s age, race, marital status, and a smorgasbord of other personal information–enough that the mother could have been legally identified even though her name wasn’t included.

As a journalism major, I know that if you put out enough information about a person to identify them, it is no different from posting the person’s name and address. For that reason, I thought almost immediately, “There’s no way in hell this is legal–or right.” It would put women at risk for harassment or worse, especially in small counties.

That law was later struck down in court. But it led me to wonder–did the people who wrote this horribly misbegotten bill intend for Oklahoma women to be harassed and trolled if they got an abortion?


Those questions grew even louder later when Cheryl Sullenger was allowed to keep her job at Operation Rescue after it emerged that she’d helped Scott Roeder keep track of George Tiller’s court dates. She knew Tiller was a marked man for anti-abortion extremists in Wichita, and yet she essentially gives his court dates to a guy off the street? At the very least, she is morally responsible for Tiller’s murder. Criminal or not, basic decency would have demanded that Sullenger be fired out of respect for Tiller’s family. To add insult to injury, Operation Rescue hired this woman even after she took part in a plan to firebomb an abortion clinic.

I had similar questions when the Republican-controlled House tried to change the definition of rape so that only instances of “forcible rape” could qualify for taxpayer funds. The GOP knows damn well that ALL rape is forcible, since rape is non-consensual by definition. Why did you and your buddies in the House GOP caucus even think this was a good idea?

But one of the final straws for me came when Florida tried to require all women getting an abortion in the state to have a vaginal ultrasound. They tried this in 2010 as well. During the first attempt, several women on Daily Kos came forward to say how horribly invasive this procedure is.

The only plausible explanation for so many instances of invasive legislation is that at its core, your movement doesn’t have a damn thing to do with protecting life. It was intended to tug at people’s heartstrings in order to get the government in our bedrooms through the back door. On paper, as a charismatic Christian, I should be receptive to pro-life arguments. But I could not see any possible good-faith explanation for this legislative overkill–unless there was an ulterior motive. Realizing that I’d been snowed, I formally resigned from the pro-life movement in March 2011.

I wasn’t quite ready to identify as pro-choice as of yet. But more instances of your movement’s complete and utter lack of respect for basic human dignity knocked the scales from my eyes. You sponsor crisis pregnancy centers that scare women by giving them inaccurate information–dangerously so, in many cases. You tried to push a Wisconsin law that would have given in-laws the power to stop abortions. And you continue to embrace Operation Rescue despite the fact it glossed over Sullenger’s irresponsible and potentially criminal actions, as well as her murderous past.

But the absolute last straw came with the ordeal of Marlise Munoz in 2014. Even though she was brain dead, she was kept on life support for almost two months because she was pregnant–a scene that can only be described as Kafkaesque. Never mind that in all states, brain death is legal death–and it is not possible to maintain life support on a dead person. Never mind that Marlise had been without oxygen for so long that it couldn’t have survived in any event.

And yet, when a judge ended this farce, Operation Rescue claimed that Marlise was in a coma, and condemned what they called the murder of an incapacitated woman and her child. Watch here.

To add insult to injury, all four Republican candidates for lieutenant governor of Texas said they would have kept Marlise on life support, and two (possibly three) of them said they would amend Texas law to require brain-dead women to stay on life support if they are pregnant. According to lawyers for the Munoz family, by this logic, hospitals would be required to check dead women for signs of pregnancy and hook them up to life support if there was a fetus there. So protecting the sanctity of human life requires desecrating corpses?????!!!!

I now realized how positively Orwellian the “pro-life” movement was. If it is even remotely possible to force corpses to stay on life support, then your movement is, at its core, about destroying the right to privacy. I also realized that a number of my Kossack friends were on to something when they suggested that it was more accurate to describe you as “forced-birthers.”

If you cared about the sanctity of life, why in the hell would you even consider something as ghoulish as keeping life support on dead people??????!!!! If that’s what the sanctity of life means, I’ll pass. As far as I’m concerned, you left me. I didn’t leave you.

Lately, I’ve wondered if I was ever a part of your movement in the first place. After all, you have declared that allowing women to get an abortion in case of rape and incest is merely a “political judgment” that is necessary to get abortion restrictions on the books. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! It’s basic human decency. Forcing a woman to keep the product of such a violation harkens back to the days when rape and incest was considered the victim’s fault.

And now you people see nothing wrong with forcing little girls to keep their pregnancies at ages when they could be at risk for serious complications, and even death, if they go that route. Just last week, you had the gall to suggest a 12-year-old rape victim could be a murderer if she ended her pregnancy. You defend the sanctity of life when you’re not only willing to degrade a rape victim, but potentially put her at risk for taunting and bullying. Don’t you DARE say you care about her well-being when you use that kind of language. And don’t you DARE say that you care about the sanctity of life. Not when you’re willing to victimize women all over again after they have been horribly violated. You are not pro-life. You are for forced birth.

In the past, I’ve had people ask, “How can you be a Christian and vote for baby-killers?” Well, I, and a number of other Christians have the weird idea that abortion isn’t the be-all and end-all to everything. Moreover, I’ve seen what your movement is about at its core–and it’s fundamentally un-American. You are trying to use abortion to destroy one of the most sacrosanct rights we have that is not enumerated in the Constitution–the right to be left alone. I cannot identify with that, and I will not identify with that. Not now. Not ever.


I’m not the only person who should be, on paper, receptive to your cause who feels this way. But I may be one of the first to lay it down in such stark terms. Either get off your sanctimonious high horses, or get out of the way.

Sincerely,

Darrell

(featured image courtesy Internets diary, available under a Creative Commons-BY license)

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.