Pro-Life= Anti-Choice Extremism?

One ad-hominem attack in the abortion debate that pro-choice folk like to use against pro-life folk is that those who are pro-life are “anti-choice extremists.” The most recent example of this came this past January from New York governor Mario Cuomo who said in a radio interview that “Extreme conservatives have no place in the state of New York.” One of the groups included in that statement were people who are opposed to abortion. The governor has since withdrawn his remarks.

To be fair, there have been radicals like Eric Rudolph who think it’s acceptable to bomb abortion clinics and commit violence in the name of being “pro-life.” And people who do that make the rest of us pro-life folk look bad. But it bothers me to hear pro-life people being insulted like that, and it’s not only because I am against abortion and don’t want to be lumped into the same category as the Eric Rudolphs of this world.

I invite my readers to think about the term “anti-choice extremists” a little more deeply, and think about the implications of it. And then let’s consider what pro-lifers do to help out women facing unplanned pregnancies. When a woman becomes pregnant and is unable or unwilling to care for her child, she is not thrust into the two opposite extremes of being forced to raise her baby against her will or choosing to abort it. She has other options and she has places to turn to for support.

She can choose to place her child for adoption.  And if she chooses adoption, she can choose whether she wants to keep in touch with her child and her child’s adoptive family or not. The mother can also choose to place her child in a guardianship setting or kinship care setting, where someone in the mother’s family or someone else she knows well raises the child on her behalf. The mother can also turn to a maternity home (if there is one in her area), where she can receive help to either prepare to raise her child or place the baby for adoption. And she can also turn to a crisis pregnancy center, where she can learn about all the different life-giving options and resources that are available to her when she doesn’t know how to handle an unexpected pregnancy. These places across the nation assist with many different forms of free support for mothers, such as access to health insurance, pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and STD testing; not to mention help finding housing, assistance to finish school, parenting classes, baby items, maternity clothing, and other things mothers and babies need.

Now let’s think about the people who work to give this help to mothers in need, and what they have in common: They are all pro-life. They give away so much of their time, monetary support, and material support to helping young women with unwanted pregnancies. They are all over the political spectrum, promoting personal and political efforts to help unwed mothers in their communities. They work tirelessly to lovingly let women know that abortion is not the only solution to their dilemma of an unwanted pregnancy. And they’re tagged as “anti-choice extremists.” That’s ironic if you ask me.

So, to conclude, I would like to discuss something I would love to see from the pro-choice crowd. It would be amazing to see them get behind efforts to build one adoption agency, one pregnancy resource center, and one maternity home for every abortion mill that’s established in their neighborhoods. Seriously. It would be wonderful. Because I have never heard of pro-choice people doing that in the name of choice. And because when the choice to abort is all about “a woman’s body and a woman’s decision,” and everyone else is supposed to back off completely and leave her alone, then there’s always the chance that the burden of an unwanted pregnancy becomes hers to carry alone. And no woman should ever be left to fend for herself during a time of great need in her life.