Umm, yeah. I'd take the “pro-life” movement more seriously if...
More at the jump.
I'd take the so-called “pro-life” movement more seriously if they valued the sanctity of women's lives, as well as the lives of their children who are already living and breathing on this Earth, as much as they do the potential lives that are growing in their mothers' wombs.
I'd take the “pro-lifers” more seriously if they allowed women and men the tools to plan their families—to prevent pregnancy before the sad and tragic decision to terminate a pregnancy would even be needed—and at times, desperately. These tools are, yes, free or reduced-cost birth control options, plus sound education on how to use contraceptives effectively to prevent unintended pregnancies.
I'd take the “pro-lifers” much more seriously if they worked to make conditions for pregnant mothers, especially those facing poverty or other difficult circumstances, more amenable for bringing children into an increasingly unforgiving country that values individual “independence” over community.
For example, the “pro-life” supporters could work to make childcare more affordable for parents who have to work full-time—and sometimes even two or three jobs—just to put food on their kids' plates and a roof over their kids' heads. Clean clothes on their kids' backs. These are not luxuries, but are the essential survival elements of today's world—of any world—and many parents in our country are faced with struggling even to achieve those.
The “pro-life” supporters would recognize that our collective support of our public-school educational system isn't a “big government handout,” but a shared goal in equipping tomorrow's generations with the tools they need to make it in a fiercely competitive global economy. Education for all of America's children is important in allowing them a chance of securing gainful employment so that they can support themselves and their families as adults, rather than relying on an increasingly unreliable social safety net to give them the essentials of life—and isn't having more people in the workforce supporting themselves what conservatives want?
Because, after all, this is the justification that “pro-lifers” continuously trumpet for why they tend not to fight for these aspects of a healthy family life in America: that women with unplanned pregnancies had sex (gasp!); ergo, they must face the consequences of (gasp!) having sex, which means they must be forced to deliver their children in a culture that has increasingly chiseled away at all of these survival essentials and left them and their families in the wilderness.
Being left in the wilderness—to suffer poverty, hunger, endless struggle at two and sometimes three thankless jobs with no light at the end of the tunnel to show for it—is what the “pro-lifers” attest is these women's just desserts for having sex. (They conveniently forget that sex that results in a pregnancy involves a man just as it does a woman—yet they make no mention of men deserving such punishment. Interesting, that.)
To these often-fundamentalist “pro-lifers,” having sex outside of any reason other than procreation is deserving of punishment, and punishment specifically for women.
This, the “pro-lifers” feel, is deserving of nothing but punishment, abandonment, and the perpetual, generational cycle of poverty to which so many Americans have long been condemned. And the lame excuse “pro-lifers” give for refusing to educate people about birth control as an alternative to being “punished” for having sex is that they don't want to “encourage promiscuity.” In other words, they don't want to encourage the kind of human connection and joy that doesn't necessarily involve conceiving a child.
Because they see sex only as a mechanical action to make babies, in which joy and connection are secondary at best and disregarded at worst—because they feel women (and most often, only women) should be punished for engaging in sex for anything other than reproduction—because they refuse to value the lives of the women who carry and bear the lives of the next generations ahead of us—I cannot take these self-purported “pro-lifers” seriously, because they so clearly don't support all life—and they definitely don't support what it means to be truly living.
Instead, I stand with Wendy Davis, Planned Parenthood, Lucille Clifton, and all of the people who came before them and still stand with them today. This is why I support Planned Parenthood and Wendy Davis's campaign fund. Won't you?