I had a brief debate with a friend on Facebook the other day about the meaning of the term "pro-life." In brief, he objected to its being only a synonym for "anti-abortion," and wanted it to have a broader meaning, taking in all the things one might believe or do to support the intrinsic value of all human life, while I responded that not everything that he wanted to encompass with "pro-life" was of the same moral significance as abortion.
His was a familiar line of thought to anyone who's been following the abortion debate for the last few decades, and it has some philosophical justification, but it's always struck me as a tactical mistake. It's not that there's anything wrong with most of the things people want to add to the definition, but that the effort to do so obscures the very distinctive, almost unique, moral problems surrounding abortion. And, it has to be admitted, the tactic has been used dishonestly for precisely that reason, to provide moral cover for Christians who don't actually think abortion is a very important issue, or perhaps are even in favor of it. (My friend was not doing that, I hasten to add.) Eventually the term becomes so vague that it's hardly more than a synonym for "good."
Coincidentally, it was only a day or so later that I ran across a perfect instance of the broadened-out-of-existence use of "pro-life." It's at a blog called Formerly Fundie, and the post is titled 10 Things You Can’t Do and Still Call Yourself “Pro-Life”. And, not surprisingly, it's a series of moral ideas formulated in such a way as to signal quite strongly a more or less progressive political agenda. But it's not so much the progressiveness that's the problem as the very broad range of the questions which the writer wants to make a required part of the definition of "pro-life."
While most are based on worthy principles (and the author seems a fine man), some are vague even at the abstract level–"gender equality"–and some are pretty trivial in comparison with abortion–use of the word "illegal," for instance. More importantly, all, at the policy level, admit of many different responses that are compatible with Christian ethics.
But it comes as no surprise that on the question of abortion itself, which is what most people on both sides of the question think of first when they hear the term "pro-life," the author pulls back, denouncing only "unrestricted, elective abortions after the age of viability." Clearly he wants to leave the present legal status of abortion more or less as it is, and to dissipate the moral pressure of the very broad Christian opposition to it. In short, he wants to appropriate "pro-life" for purposes other than opposition to abortion.
It's a well-worn tactic, and sometimes a useful one for its proponents. But for opponents of abortion it functions mainly as a distraction, generating a lot of useless arguments and encouraging division. For that reason I've often regretted the adoption of "pro-life" as a synonym for "anti-abortion." I've always assumed it was done because someone thought it would be better to be for something than against something, to be positive rather than negative.
But it seems rhetorically defensive, as if there was some slight misgiving about the cause, some lack of confidence. Many political movements have proclaimed themselves anti-something with the greatest assurance and certainty: no one who is anti-war or anti-racism is reluctant to say so in the plainest terms. It's too late to change now, but I think it would have been more effective to say straightforwardly that the anti-abortion movement is precisely that, and proudly.
Light On Dark Water 
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