Consistently Pro-Life

Good ol' Chuck Colson recently lamented the election of Obama with the following words: "The President-elect, along with his newly strengthened allies in Congress, opposes almost every pro-life and pro-family position conservative Evangelicals and conservative Catholics have fought for so hard."

I am so sick of conservatives claiming to have the edge on "pro-life" and "pro-family" positions!

It's true that the right tends to be pro-life and the left pro-choice, or, as I like to say, "anti-life" when it comes to abortion. But is this all it means to have a consistent ethic of life? Hardly. It is equally pro-life to be opposed to all of the machinations of war which destroy human life on massive scales and consider the death of innocent women and children to be "collateral damage." Take a long look at the pictures coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan and tell me that the Republican party is "pro-life."

Being "pro-life" ought to include refusing to play God with someone's soul by choosing when they should live and when they should be put to death. The United States, along with China and several radical Islamic countries, leads the world in executions. This is spearheaded by many "pro-life" Republicans.

And why is it that the religious right will fight tooth and nail for a child to be born into this world, but as soon as that child is born, they are on their own -- without health care and without structures that prevent the child from being malnourished or sucked into systems of poverty? I only wish evangelicals were as loudly advocating for our toddlers as they are advocating for our unborn. But that great pro-lifer George Bush vetoed a bill that would have provided basic health care to kids under five years old -- in the richest country in the world, no less. Is the right consistently pro-life? I don't think so.

For 20 of the past 28 years, a Republican has been in the White House. During that entire time, promises were made to us that Roe v Wade would be overturned. It's beginning to look to me like the right has been using this issue to form a coalition for the purposes of perpetuating their own power. I honestly doubt the sincerity of many so-called pro-life Republicans who claim to be pro-life, but when pressed on the issue cannot even promise to nominate a pro-life supreme court justice if the opportunity came along (as McCain recently admitted).

Let's expand our definition of "pro-life" to mean opposition to the following things which bring death:

abortion,

the poverty that leads young women to chose abortion,

euthanasia,

war and war-mongering,

the global weapons trade,

extreme poverty,

environmental degradation which poisons the water our kids drink,

capital punishment, and

genocide taking place in countries that are irrelevant to our own "national interest."

That's a pro-life agenda worth advancing -- and it's not one owned by either the Republicans or Democrats.