There’s something we need to get straight in the ongoing abortion war. What terms should we use for referring to people who are in favor of, or against, a legal system in which abortion is permitted? Back in the day, pro-choice and pro-life were the agreed-upon terms, but as political tensions got ever warmer, people on both sides of the lines became intent on modifying the terms as a form of attack. This was not an unreasonable move, in fact. The terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life” identified what each party took to be the good that it was defending. At some point, each camp must have said to themselves, “Why are we granting the other side such a positive-sounding title? We need some way to express their depravity in a nutshell, so we can emphasize it every time we refer to them.” Hence the terms “anti-choice” and “pro-abortion” were born. In some ways, I actually find these terms quite useful. They identify, not just the ideological commitments of the referent, but also those of the speaker, and thus convey more information in the same amount of time. Still, we might need to think a little harder about them, because I’m not sure these terms are exactly fitting.

Actually, I’m not too terribly unhappy about being labeled “anti-choice,” because it’s quite true that “choice” as such is not something that I champion as one of life’s greatest goods. When the “choice” in question concerns whether or not to kill one’s own child, I guess I am pretty “anti”. Nor am I in favor of giving people choices as to whether or not to murder their parents, rape their sisters, or burn down their neighbors’ houses. I don’t even favor giving people choices about whether or not to pay their taxes or pass tests before they can drive. I’m anti-choice in lots of ways when it comes down to it.

Nonetheless, if technically asked my opinion, I would have to say that “anti-choice” is not entirely appropriate for expressing the position of the anti-abortion camp. My thinking goes something like this: the so-called “pro-choice” camp would have you believe that they are working to expand the options available to a pregnant woman. She has more choices now: she can raise her baby, give it up for adoption, or kill it in utero. She had two choices before Roe vs. Wade, and now she has three. See, more choices! On a legal level, I guess this is more or less indisputable. On a practical level, however, I suspect that women who are pregnant and desperate have the same number of choices now that they’ve always had… except now their available options are worse.

A century ago, a pregnant woman had little choice but to bear her child; there was the outside option of trying to procure a so-called “back alley” abortion, but this was dangerous and carried severe risks to her. Now, pregnant women in bad situations — that is, ones who are very young, or very poor, and probably unmarried — are often offered little choice but to abort their babies. In the old days, when pregnancy was automatically associated with, well, babies, other people who had some responsibility for the pregnancy (i.e. fathers) or at least some responsibility for the girl (parents, communities, university administrators) were more or less forced to step up and lend a hand. Fathers were often forced to marry their pregnant girlfriends, and parents, however angry they might be, were usually persuaded to help in one way or another. Now that abortion is on the table, these persons often feel considerably less pressure to be supportive. By making the pregnancy “her choice,” liberals have likewise made the outcome “her fault” exclusively, at least in the eyes of fathers (or parents) who thought their obligations should have been discharged with the offer to drive her to the clinic and pay their half. It’s pretty widely known by now that a large number of women who get abortions say explicitly that they didn’t want to do it, but that they felt they had no choice given the lack of available support. So, the bottom line is, the women we’re all most concerned about (that is, the poor and unmarried ones) still don’t feel like they have a choice. I may not be a big fan of choice, but when it comes down to it I may not be much more anti-choice than your average liberal.

So anyway, I’d rather protest abortion than the label “anti-choice,” but I’m still not sure it’s quite fair. In the interests of fairness, though, we should perhaps look through the eyes of our opponents, who might be similarly annoyed by the title “pro-abortion.” Their grounds for protest aren’t so difficult to see. They are not (they would tell us) in favor of abortion. They think it’s very sad, very unfortunate, not something they personally could ever do, and on and on until they get to the part where we eliminate the need for abortion through progressive social programs. (Cue rolling eyes.) Now, don’t get me wrong. This stuff infuriates me as much as anybody. Still, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that most of them (with a few exceptions, such as some Planned Parenthood workers) actually like the idea of abortion per se. You’d have to be something of a sadist to feel that way about it, and most of them aren’t sadists. They’re just cowards, who would rather bite the abortion bullet and try not to think about what that really means, than risk giving up some of their fundamentally selfish liberal ideals. They’re not so much pro-abortion as people who are letting themselves avoid thinking too much about what abortion really is.

Again, I don’t want to make a big fuss about this. I use the term pro-abortion myself sometimes, and as I mentioned above, I think it’s useful for how much information it conveys about the attitudes of both speaker and referent. But I just wanted to suggest: wouldn’t it really be better to label these folks with the term anti-life?

I know, of course, what most of them would say. They’re not anti-life. They love life. In fact, they’re trying to make life even better through their progressive social programs. They’d say that, and they’d even believe it, but they would be wrong. The truth is that the ideology that motivates this group of people does not value life for its own sake. It values autonomy, self-actualization, perhaps the exercise of the rational faculty, but not life per se. In the philosophies of advocates of legalized abortion, one cannot find much regard for the living creature as such. Life is of course a prerequisite to some other things that are valued (e.g. personal autonomy) but except insofar as it enables some of these other goods to be realized, there is no reason why a live thing is better than a dead one. One even sometimes hears the question, “What good is it for the child to be alive if it doesn’t get a secure home, good health care, a decent education?” and so forth. There is an implicit assumption behind this question, namely, that life in itself has no moral value.

Furthermore, we see the same anti-life tendencies manifested with regards to other questions. The championing of euthanasia is one such issue — why shouldn’t a person choose to be dead if that’s what he prefers? — and in incidents like the Terri Schiavo case where living persons (who, incidentally, are inconvenient to keep alive) have lost the components that would make their lives “valuable” in liberal eyes. This was the thrust of Pope John Paul II’s arguments about the “culture of death,” and it seems to me that his insights on that topic were basically right.

I conclude, finally, that it would be perfectly right and fitting for us to begin referring to the supporters of legal abortion as “anti-life.” Any takers?