If you call yourself “pro-life” you need to actually be just that–pro life. As in, you don’t support killing people. As in, you believe in a culture of life, not one of death. That you care about the lives of more than just those who are yet to be born.
You know what it doesn’t mean? Asking the city to zone an abortion clinic out of existence on the grounds that people keep shooting abortionists there.Yes, you read that right. Anti-abortion activists in Wichita are asking the city to keep an abortion clinic from opening because they can’t manage to stop shooting at people.
If you use the violence that your own associates have committed as the excuse for why a clinic shouldn’t be allowed to open, I’m not going to call you pro-life. You aren’t. You can’t call yourself pro-life and then use the specter of violence like this. It’s not pro-life. If it’s pro anything, it’s pro-birth, but as much as I know that the movement hates it when people use the term “anti-abortion”, that’s all you are.
As I’ve written about before, this is the kind of thing that caused me to become disillusioned with the pro-life movement. If you think I’m being overly harsh, snarky, or sarcastic in this post, you try being trotted out in front of cameras at 12 years old to play the role of the “innocent kid who will be made a criminal if you pass abortion clinic buffer zone laws” and to insist that the movement is non-violent, not knowing that the people who had sent you out in front of the cameras had already gotten word that the movement had turned deadly that day and see how you react. And try being a 13 year old picketer and having clinic defenders screaming at you because they’d just gotten word that Paul Hill murdered two people and wounded a third. Or maybe consider the horror I felt when I read the stories about George Tiller’s murder and realized that the people the killer had associated with who were busy running their mouths to the press were people I’d met as a kid.
So no, I’m not going to be charitable to these people. They aren’t pro-life, they’re militant hard right activists who think nothing of raising the specter of deadly force to manipulate a government into doing their bidding. Last I checked, using force or the threat of force to achieve political ends isn’t being pro-life, it’s terrorism. Yes, terrorism. The pro-life movement needs to immediately and unequivocally condemn the activists in Wichita for this.
Bottom line. You can’t call yourself pro-life if you don’t condemn this behavior.