How to keep the pro-life movement small
Thomas-Bailey, Jane
308: I How to keep the pro-life movement small am a faithful participant in our annual Local March for Life. I feel it's the least I can do to \\ alk a...
...That must include the personal responsibility of men who don't want children, but impregnate women, and the corporate responsibility of a maledominated economy that makes few allowances for babies...
...Until all of these ideologies can be sorted out, my fear is that the pro-life movement will remain a minority coalition of religious conservatives...
...In an odd way, however, men have been excluded from the pro-life message, too...
...other women have chosen abortion...
...All too often they are merely trying to keep the rent paid and food on the table...
...irrevocably linked to school prayer and creches on the courthouse steps...
...Too often too many of the voices in pro-life leadership are male, I wonder as they speak, how many of them have ever had to choose between a baby and a promotion...
...1 have also felt excluded because I am a woman who must work outside my home...
...The pro-life cause jean be argued quite validly and successfully on scientific and humanitarian grounds that appeal to people of many beliefs, including Christians...
...If we wast to get a broad coalition of people on the side of the unborn, we must base our public arguments on those grounds...
...What's worse, they're not talking to alot of people like me who haven't decided yet what to believe about abortion...
...Since when did that become the criterion of the pro-life movement...
...This article originally appeared in the Winter 1987 number «/Sisterlife (8]I East 47th St., Kansas City, Mo...
...I chose to delay conception...
...You can tell people to vote pro-life without invoking either the church or the Republican party, I wonder how many potential pro-lifers have been turned away because of this ideological confusion...
...This plays right into the arguments of proabortionists who argue that pro-lifers are religious zealots trying to force their arcane beliefs about ensoulment down other people's throats...
...I have seen a lot of teenage girls bravely tell of the baby they had, or the abortion they had...
...Many people do not like to have religion blared at them through loudspeakers in public squares...
...But I think a lot ot people turn off these messages as fast as they turn off the TV evangelists who flicker by on the TV dial...
...Mostly they're talking to themselves...
...I applaud them for their courage in speaking out...
...I feel it's the least I can do to \\ alk a half-mile and listen to a few speeches so that I can be added to the body count that will appear in the next day's newspaper...
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...1 am not putting them down for being religious...
...But too often these critical issues are on a collision course with the conservative political and religious agendas that I wrote of above...
...The subliminal message from the songs, and from many of the speakers, is that you have to share these religious beliefs before you can become pro-life...
...If these problems were addressed constructively from the public soapbox, more women would pause to listen to our message...
...1A}iE thomaS-bailey Jane Thomas-Baity is assistant editor of Sisterlife, the quarterly newsletter published by Feminists/or Life of America...
...Those boys and men are among us, but for some reason we have put only the girls and women on the spot...
...First of ail, they sing a lot of songs about God — and a very Christian God at that...
...Nor am I saying that faith should be confined to sanctuaries...
...Worst of all, the religious language only reinforces the belief that abortion is "'a religious issue...
...Of course it is wrong to kill an unborn baby in such a situation, but it is also wrong for the pro-life movement to ignore the problems that employed women 309 face...
...1 also reel excluded from much pro-Ufe rhetoric because I am a political liberal...
...That message needs to be heard as much as the message of the woman who had an abortion needs to be heard...
...Then more women, and more men, will begin to take us seriously...
...The pro-life movement needs to address male responsibility for abortion...
...I have heard speakers urge me to vote for "godly, conservative candidates...
...The Jew, the agnostic, the liberal Protestant, the Unitarian, walk quickly by thinking, "This cause is obviously not for me...
...Yet I have heard pro-life speakers frown on the first and castigate the second as if women were utterly selfish for seeking a bijger paycheck...
...I, and many of my colleagues, have...
...But I often feel that the people who run thi- show aren't talking to me...
...I have never seen a boy (or a man) stand up in public to tell of the remorse he feels for impregnating several young women and then for denying responsibility for the babies...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 10
