Quaker Voice / Quaker Spirit

Website Established and Maintained by Daniel A. Seeger

Let’s Be Clear: The Anti-Abortion Movement

Is Not About the Sanctity of Human Life

Why are abortion opponents so concerned about the sacred personhood of fetal life, while raising not a murmur about the 5.2 million living children under five years old who perish each year due to hunger, easily preventable disease, and war?

Children do not die of starvation because there is not enough food (although some time in the future this might be the case).  Right now, children die of starvation and easily preventable disease because they cannot afford the food and medicine they require. The global and domestic economic systems which are designed and maintained by the great and the powerful – systems where the fruits of the earth and of human labor are allowed to flow into the private possession of absurdly wealthy individuals while millions remain impoverished – are the cause of millions of child deaths.  Yet, where is the outrage by “sanctity of human life” proponents?

Think of the children who died horribly as a result of napalm and artillery attacks because wealthy American elites felt uncomfortable with the Vietnamese people’s desire to conduct their national life according to socialist principles.  Or of the children who died in Iraq because a phony fear of weapons of mass destruction camouflaged our wish to grab that country’s oil.  How surprising is it that children are dying in Ukraine because Vladimir Putin is playing the same game?  While all these wars have, thankfully, generated opposition, anti-abortion right-to-life proponents were not, in general, conspicuous participants in such opposition.

The starving children and the child war-victims are considered expendable in the eyes of the great and powerful people – mostly white men – who run things for their own economic benefit without detectable opposition from right-to-lifers.  But if a woman determines she requires an abortion to alleviate her own, often desperate, micro-economy, suddenly the sanctity of life comes into view.  As comedian George Carlin has pointed out, anti-abortion people care about us for the nine months from conception to birth, but after that we are on our own – no paid family leave, no pre-school, no school lunches, etc. – until we reach military age, when so-called right-to-lifers seem to have no problem sending us off to war to kill and be killed.

Abortion presents awesome ethical, spiritual, and social dilemmas which are obscured by the sloganeering on all sides.  Indeed, polling reveals that the consensus about abortion among the common people of the United States is one which exceeds in wisdom the views of learned Supreme Court justices and of the extremists on either side of the question.  See bit.ly/3hQvIPU for a fuller discussion.