Back over at Feministe again, I found myself reading a string of posts abourt abortion and contraception.  And it got me thinking, as I looked back at older posts and responses from trolls, about the whole concept of "pro life".

Let me lay it out like this.

What does the term "pro life" make you think of?  If you take this phrase, and excise from it all the political implications and knowledge you have of the group the term actually applies to?

If I remove those known connotations, and use the phrase "pro-life" on it's own, I find that I could consider myself "pro life".   I like life.  I support the idea of aiding life.

I support access to education for all people, regardless of income. 
Because having access to education allows people to protect themselves, to anticipate danger and to react in a more informedmanner to situations that could cause harm.  For example, thanks to my education I know that replacing a lightbulb whilst the light is switched on is dangerous.  The lightbulb may be hot, the new one may pop as it goes in.  This may surprise me and I may fall to the ground and injure myself.  I may get shocked by the electricity.  Thanks to my education, I know that injuries can become infected if they are not cleaned, and I know the consequences of infection.  So, I switch off the light at the wall before changing the bulb, and if I cut myself when gardening I wash the injury and dress it.

I support access to healthcare for all people, both preventative and curative. 
A person who has dangerously high blood pressure and cholesterol would be better off taking medication to control this, thereby reducing the risk of suffering heart or circulatory problems later in life.  If someone gets cancer, they are better off receiving the treatment prescribed, whether surgery, medication, radiotherapy or a combination of choices.

I support the benefits system, for people on low incomes, those out of work and those without a home. 
The benefits system works, in its way, as both a preventative masure and treatment for a problem.  The problem is people having too little income to support themselves.  The solution is assisting their income, so that they are able to support themselves and, perhaps, even save up for more education, to provide a better paying job, so they no longer require benefits to survive.  This also prevents people in more precarious situations from having to choose between food and heating in the Winter, or from becoming homeless, or from starving to death on the streets.

I support offering counselling, therapy and assistance to drug addicts.
And providing safe houses with clean needles and purer versions of the drugs to those who do not respond well to the therapy, so that those who cannot control their addictions can at least be protected from dying due to infected needles, used and dirty needles, contaminated drugs and the violent crime associated with illegal drug use.  I would legalise, then heavily regulate, recreational drug use.

If I was "pro life" and I believed that, from the moment sperm and egg touch, the result is a baby or an underdeveloped human being, I would want to reduce the abortion rate as much as possible.
I would want to provide people with access to safe, affordable, effective contraception of all sorts, so that fewer accidental or unwanted pregnancies occur.  After all, the sperm and egg separate aren't a human being.  I would work to challenge the perceptions of entitlement men have, and work to reduce rape and sexual abuse.  I would work to teach men that there is no excuse for refusing to use contraception unless you want a pregnancy to occur.  I would provide education for all that taught the truth about sex, sexuality, love and the myriad complexities of human relationships and their consequences.  I would give young girls self-defence classes, to protect them from rape, and would provide 24-hour helplines for those who have been assaulted, or who just need advice.

I would also want to work on the miscarriage rate. 
Over at Feministe they mentioned the miscarriage rate in America is something like 70%.  If I truly was "pro life" and I believed that blastocysts are people, I would be advocating seriously for medical research into the causes and prevention of miscarriages.  In fact, I would find that a far morepressing issue than the small number of women who have abortions.

If I was pro life, I would see no problem with providing abortions in the case of medical necessity, where the pregnancy would cause death or harm to the mother. 
I would also review the statistics of abortion worldwide, which show that, in countries where abortion as illegalized, the main effect had was that more unsafe, illegal, back-alley abortion occurred, resultingin the deaths of the foetuses and pregnant women.  I would, considering everything else Ihad done, conclude that it is less harmful to ensure that abortion is accessible, safe and affordable, than to leave women to mutilate themselves.

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Let's look at the above, and compare that to what "pro life" really seems to mean.

Pro-lifers do not care about born children.
Pro-life groups refuse to support or back programmes aimed at providing education and healthcare for children.

Pro-lifers do not care about women
Pro-life groups usually do not advocate for wider access to contraception, which would reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.

Pro-lifers do not care about reducing the abortion rate
Pro-life groups tend to support abstinence-only programmes, leaving young girls and women uninformed, and sometimes even misinformed, about sex, contraception nd the risks involved.

Pro-lifers do not care about saving lives
Many pro-life advocates would not allow abortion in the case of ectopic pregnancies, or other life-threatening circumstances.  They also ignore the fact that countries in which abortion is illegal suffer heavily from death and mutilation of women due to illegal and unsafe abortions.

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And finally...

If I was pro-life, and I truly believed that life begins at conception, then I would see abortion as premeditated murder.  Miscarriage, if it can be attributed to a woman acting irresponsibly whilst pregnant, such as drinking o smoking or taking illegal drugs, would be manslaughter.

And I would want women punished equal to that.

Pro-lifers, however, seem to have real difficulty with that concept.  So, maybe, they don't really see abortion as murder.  And don't really see foetuses and blastocysts as people, or babies.

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In conclusion.

Pro-lifers do not care about the wellbeing or health of children or adults once theyr are born.  They don't really consider foetuses or blastocysts as "pre-born children" and don't actually care about life.

Theonly time pro-lifers congregate in force to speak out about something is when a woman tries to exercise control over her own body by trying to access abortion or birth control.

So, is it really just about wanting to control women's bodies?  But, of course, being "pro-control" doesn't have a nice ring to it.  You can't use pictures of dead babies and wave them in people's faces to derail and hijack arguments, avoiding all the issues, if your only reason for trying to stop abortions is because you don't want the dirty women having dirty sex, and you want to punish them when they do.

Overall, I think I prefer being pro-choice.  Pro-choice means that I support access to all the things I listed above, but have no problem with abortions and I would not seek to punish women for having miscarriages.

Note!
I realise that many people who consider themselves pro-life may well support the things I mentioned, and many others simply don't think their stance through, so derailed are they by the pictures of dead babies.  I am talking, here, about the ones running the pro-life side of things.