What Is the Pro-Life Movement?
Several years ago, I was part of a Catholic mission group. We spent a year talking to high schoolers and working in a Florida parish. I have thoughts on intentional missionary communities and spiritual abuse, but those will have to wait.
One of the things we did was pray outside a Planned Parenthood. We didn’t hold signs, we didn’t talk to the people going in, we just stood (or knelt) and prayed.
I hated it.
We went twice, and the second time, I couldn’t do it. I left halfway through the prayer (much to my team’s surprise), sat in the car, and cried. I felt sick, I felt ashamed, I felt wrong. I told my team leader I wouldn’t go again, and that was that.
But three years later, I’m still thinking about it. And in the light of the last year, with Texas and Oklahoma and now the likely overturn of Roe V. Wade, I still don’t know what to think. I’m not going to talk about those laws or my opinions on them. Instead, I will ask one simple question: what is the “pro-life” movement?
First off, a little more about me. I have a complicated relationship with the movement, to begin with. Yes, I’m Catholic, but I’ve been Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, and a searching Christian. My main goal is to love others and do my best for them, and this is why I’m not sure what to think about all this.
Because I’m a feminist and firmly believe that the only person who can control a person’s body is themself.
Because I believe that life is precious from the cradle to the grave and that we should treat every life with dignity and love.
Because I think that “pro-life” should mean pro-immigrant, pro gun-control, pro-climate, pro-love, pro-prison reform, pro-mental health, pro-woman, pro-health care (for all), anti-racist, anti-death penalty, anti-war, and as inclusive as possible. If God is love (and He is), He must want the best and most fulfilling life for every single one of his children.
As if these views weren’t confusing enough in today’s embroiled political and religious climate, I have a few more personal conflicting factors.
I was not supposed to be born. I’m not your classic miracle child, but my mom couldn’t have kids due to her appendix rupturing when she was a pre-teen. In the 1990s, my longsuffering and determined mother underwent multiple rounds of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) to have my older brother, me, a miscarriage, and my younger brother.
If you have an in-depth understanding of Catholicism, you might know that IVF is expressly forbidden in the Catechism. While many Catholics might shrug this off and say that life is precious no matter where it came from, more fundamental Catholics (and many Protestants) do not.
I wasn’t supposed to be born, and I’m technically not protected under the “Pro-life” movement. I’ve had Christians (Catholic and otherwise) tell me that they love me, but they disagree with my conception. People have compared IVF to conception by rape and said it’s not my fault, but my parents sinned.
One person told me that I would be such a force for good in the pro-life movement once I “healed” from it. I’ve stopped telling people I’m IVF because I’m tired of hearing, “Well, God wills good out of bad.” This implies, of course, that I might be good, but my conception, my existence, is bad.
These are people that I love and that loved me. They said this to my face.
I don’t understand how creating life through love and science is wrong. I’m not Frankenstein’s monster — I was made with my mom and dad’s DNA and grew in her uterus. I was wanted so badly, my mom was willing to go through weeks of bed rest and pain just to have me. My life is worth protecting.
Now, let’s talk about adoption. I have three adopted siblings, so before anyone says that my parents should have adopted, they did. Thrice. Adoption is a beautiful, complicated, heartbreaking thing, and it’s definitely not perfect.
Of my adopted siblings, not one of them finished high school in our home. All three had varying degrees of attachment disorder, and two of them have Reactive Attachment Disorder. I love them, but there are wounds, boundaries, and strained relationships because of this.
My parents did their best. They’re great parents, but parenting kids with special needs is challenging. It’s hard for the adopted kids, the parents (in most cases, especially the mom), and the adoptive siblings. We all have scars from our adoption story.
However, my adopted siblings are the ones who have the most scars (and active wounds). Each of them, in their way, has to live with a particular hole in their heart. My sister has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, so she has literal holes in her brain. My brother spent ten years in an orphanage and has never told us what happened to him there. My other sister has suffered the fallout of trying to understand why her birth mother had to give her up (try explaining poverty to a sobbing, confused three-year-old).
I’m white, but my adopted siblings are all BIPOC, which added to their identity confusion. How can they walk through the world when they were raised white but are subject to the daily issues that come with racism? We didn’t know how to prepare them for that because we had the privilege of not being aware of it.
No one prepared my family for this. No one sat my mom and dad down and told them about racism, attachment disorder, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, or the trauma it would inflict on them, their other kids, and their adopted kids.
Adoption is complicated.
It is a broken way to fix a broken system. It’s not the bandaid that fixes abortions.
That is my complicated approach to the pro-life movement. It doesn’t include my LGTBQ+ friends, living through a pandemic, seeing abject poverty in America and other countries, and realizing with much of the world the structural racial injustices in America. These and so many different experiences are part of my outlook, but it’s impossible to quantify them all.
Babies are wonderful. They’re important. But so are lives outside the womb, and I haven’t seen evidence of a pro-life movement that works for justice from the beginning of life to the end. I understand why many people call it the “anti-abortion” movement — most of the time, that’s all we see.
I don’t have answers — I’m still as confused as three years ago, weeping in a minivan outside a Florida Planned Parenthood. And while I know I’ll never do that again, I don’t know where to stand. I’m not sure there’s anywhere that won’t alienate many people I know and love because politics and personal relationships are sometimes too entangled.
I just want to show God’s love, and from what I’ve seen, I don’t think the pro-life movement does that very well.
I love my parents. I love my biological siblings. I love my adopted siblings. Despite my somewhat chaotic childhood, we had a good and loving home. I am privileged to have grown up in middle-class, suburban, white America and had two loving parents.
I’m glad none of us — from my parents to my siblings to my loved ones — were aborted.
But I can’t begin to understand the complications that go into abortions, medical, financial, personal, or emotional. I’ve never been pregnant, unexpectedly or not. I’m not a doctor, so I can’t tell you whether your pregnancy is threatening your life. I have a good job, but I have a support system to fall back on even if I didn’t. I have a supportive fiancé who would back me on any decision. I don’t think I, personally, would get an abortion, but look at the privilege I have to be able to say that.
For another person, in another situation, it’s not my place to decide.
Is it yours?
