I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.
Sister Joan Chittister, Catholic Nun (via timehasflewn)
Emma says: if you are truly pro-life, then let’s talk about universal and free early child education; tuition vouchers for working parents; paid maternity/paternity leave; free and accessible contraception; an improved foster care system; etc. etc. Until you’re ready to frame pro-life as a lifelong responsibility that society has to a child, then I’m not willing to listen to you. At. All.
(via emmadelosnardos)
This. I consider myself pro-life, but I get into arguments with my pro-life friends, because they always go off about “abortion evil blah blah blah,” and I’ve told them that if I were offered a choice between a politician who supports an anti-abortion bill, and a politician who’s pro-choice but wants to beef up the services offered to support pregnant women and young families, I’d vote for the latter because frankly they’d be doing more good.
As far as I’m concerned, pro-life doesn’t mean taking away a woman’s choice of whether to have a child. It means giving them tools to help them control and decide for themselves whether/when to have a child: teaching young people about responsible sex, sexual health, and contraceptive options; what having respect for themselves and their bodies really means; how to protect themselves and oh, also how not to be rapists. It means providing services and options so that a woman CAN keep the child if she wants it: affordable health care and child care; paid maternity—and paternity!—leave; counselling and education (for the child AND the parents, because it’s not like pregnancy and child-rearing are things that you magically know all about the minute it becomes relevant).
Oh, also? It means placing equal responsibility and expectation on the man to take care of that child. If you want to go around telling women they have to keep the baby, then you’d damn well better call the male involved to the carpet too.
To be very blunt, I’m really sick of hearing the pro-life/pro-choice debate revolve around abortion, because honestly? It’s not solving a damn thing. It’s only obfuscating the issues that need to be addressed if you want any real progress on either side! I’m enough of a cynic at this point to think that most of the politicians arguing both sides are pretty damn happy with that, too, because it’s so much easier to get voters worked up and frothing and locked in a blind headbutting battle than to be held accountable for making any actual changes.
(via prettyarbitrary)