Though less frequently in the news, the abortion wars continue. Each side’s strategies and tactics are frequently ineffective at best, and frequently dishonest and hypocritical as well. The pro-lifers should worry less about laws restricting abortion and more about ways and means of reducing unwanted pregnancies and improving the health of women and their babies, both before and after birth. And pro-choicers must stop trying to eliminate pro-life pregnancy care centers, and recognize that true freedom of choice means not only the right to choose abortion, but the right to choose giving birth as well.
For months we’ve been preoccupied with tariffs, inflation, border control, drug-running (do we shoot or pardon drug runners?), the contents of the Epstein files, etc., etc., etc. But though public attention has been diverted, at least temporarily, from the abortion wars, the combatants continue, with varying degrees of bad will, ineffectiveness, dishonesty, and hypocrisy.
Pro-lifers, in particular, have been remarkably ineffective in capitalizing on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They’ve failed, for the most part, to enact more restrictive anti-abortion measures for at least two reasons. First, many of their measures have been deemed too harsh and vindictive by he general public. Their proposed measures would usually limit the right to an abortion only to women whose pregnancies threatened their lives, but even then, their measures would be ambiguous enough for physicians and other health care providers to fear criminal prosecution should they perform abortions for endangered women. Besides, for better or worse, between two-thirds and three-fourths of the public opposed any limitations on abortion during the first three months of pregnancy anyway, and the ham-fisted tactics of pro-life zealots probably strengthens, rather than weakens, public opposition to limiting abortion rights. Clearly, pro-life activists must adopt new strategies and tactics should they wish to limit abortions.
Pro-choicers frequently accuse pro-lifers of either being concerned with life only before birth or of wanting only to control women’s bodies. Pro-lifers, in response, should downplay attempts to control abortion through law, and instead actively meet the challenge of being truly pro-life by advocating the research, development, and implementation of more effective policies on sex education, birth control, and neo-natal, natal, and post-natal care for women and their newborns. For starters, they should agitate for revising Medicaid policies and restoring both research funds recently cut as well as foreign aid used to fight excessive population growth. If these policies reduce the incidence of unprotected sex leading to unwanted pregnancies, and ease the burdens of pregnancy on women, especially the poor, then the unwanted pregnancy rate, and therefore the abortion rate, may decline, despite the absence of laws prohibiting abortion. Moreover, the quality of life for all concerned will be enhanced as well, which should also be a pro-life goal.
And pro-choice activists should recognize that abortion rights should include not only the right to an abortion, but the right not to get an abortion as well. This point used to be made by pro-choice advocates defending themselves against charges that they were baby-killers. Their response used to be that the point of the pro-choice movement was to expand women’s freedom and options, and that choosing not to have an abortion was no less valid than choosing to have one.
But Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker reports that since the decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, “more than 100 [pregnancy care] centers, pro-life organizations and churches were attacked with arson, firebombing and vandalism…Jane’s Revenge, a pro-choice activist group, claimed responsibility for more than a dozen of those incidents.” Moreover, she reports, pro-choice politicians, including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York City Mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, have vowed to ‘crack down’ on pro-life pregnancy centers, accusing them of ‘false and deceptive’ information. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, an uncompromising supporter of abortion rights, is coming to the defense of the right of pro-life centers to operate in response to efforts by the Attorney General of New Jersey to acquire confidential financial records, including the list of pro-life donors.
To close down pro-life pregnancy care centers is to reduce the choices women have when deciding to seek counseling, especially if they’re seeking assistance to keep, rather than abort, their unborn babies. Moreover, to block access to such centers, which Senator Warren says may otherwise “torture a pregnant person,” is to assert that women can’t make up their own minds concerning what they want to do about their pregnancies and how they want to do it. Aren’t women allowed to make their own choices without having Warren, Mamdani, and others determining where they can and cannot go?
Both sides need to more truly and consistently advocate for what they say they want. Pro-lifers must begin to care more about actual life, and not just about harsh, ineffective, and counterproductive laws. And pro-choicers must condemn violence against pro-life centers as vigorously as they would (rightly) condemn violence against abortion facilities. Further, they must recognize that any right to do something is meaningless unless there is the right not to do it as well, and reaffirm the right to choose not to have an abortion, rather than making it more difficult for those who choose to give birth and keep their babies to do so.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville since 1987 and taught politics and government at Tarleton for 36 years, retiring in 2023. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990-2024). He was Mayor pro-tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Stephenville
Economic Development Authority since 2018, and as chair of the Erath County Appraisal District’s Appraisal Review Board since 2015. He is also a member of the Stephenville Rotary Club, the Board of Vestry of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and the Executive Committee of the Boy Scouts’ Pecan Valley District. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
People that claim to be anti-abortion are just nosy busybody religious people, that need to mind their own business and pray to God that one of their loved ones don’t end up having to bleed out in the parking lot of a hospital, because they can’t get the abortion they need to save their life, religious people that claim to be anti-abortion, they just want you to think they’re smart, they’re nothing of the sort. That’s why they have to fake it trying to sound smart, they’re just religious bigots.