The Right Wing idea of pro life is one that confuses me. I do understand that issues are complicated and multifaceted, but it’s not hard to see and identify generally held trends and beliefs.
Pro Life tends to believe that any sort of abortion, for any reason, is unacceptable on religious and moral grounds. Even a fetus conceived in incestuous rape has a right to life immediately after conception. There are no questions of particular stages of development wherein true sentience should be determined; a fetus has a soul immediately after conception.
Apparently the fetus even has the right to be born if it is dead. A recently proposed bill in Georgia wishes to outlaw abortions after 20 weeks even if the fetus has died and would be stillborn, one legislator claiming that pigs and cows do it all the time.
So the Pro Life movement obviously has strong feelings about the sanctity of life. They seem, however, to stop once the birth is complete. Typically, the same Right Wing Pro Lifers also have these other political beliefs:
-The tend to be against any kind of government support for children born in unfortunate circumstances to get assistance in order to be better fed or receive essential medical care.
-They tend to be pro death penalty, with Republican states being some of the very few civilized places in the world where the death penalty is still practiced.
-They tend to be the Hawks in Foreign Affairs, with many of the major wars inflicted by the U.S. being the result of Republican Presidents and acts of a Republican Congress.
-They tend to be pro-gun, especially the kind that are designed only to kill people.
It would be interesting to find out what kind of political ideology supported the eugenics programs practiced by many states about 60 years ago, sterilizing those who they thought were unfit to reproduce. I haven’t been able to search that out. Who knows; maybe it was a Liberal initiative, -but I sort of doubt it.
There is a paradox here. It seems that for many Right Wing social conservatives, Pro Life is really more Pro Fetus and Anti Choice. In most of its policies it seems to be remarkably Anti Life.
PW's Rants 