In light of the anti-choice legislation popping up in states like South Dakota, Iowa, Florida, and Texas (to name a few),  I want to highlight what is rarely discussed in the abortion debate: the deceptive, duplicitous hypocrisy of the “pro-life” agenda.  For starters, “pro-life” is an inaccurate term to use when describing those who want to outlaw abortion.  “Pro-life” implies that one is for the preservation of life no matter what.  But a closer look at the “pro-life” platform demonstrates a rejection of policies that would actually preserve and sustain the lives of many.  So from here on out I will refer to them as “anti-choice” (although anti-women, anti-family, and anti-human would also work).

The primary abortion-prevention strategy of anti-choicers is to make the procedure harder and harder to obtain through draconian legislation, until they can ban abortion all together.  While I do believe reducing the need for abortion is a noble goal, a great deal of evidence demonstrates that the legal status of abortion does not determine how prevalent it is.  Abortion existed in the United States long before Roe v Wade.  Prior to the existence of legal and safe access, thousands of women died and many thousands more suffered serious health complications from having unsafe, illegal abortions.  I suppose anti-choicers are unaware of this inconvenient fact, or else they would recognize that outlawing abortion would greatly endanger the lives of women, which they purport to be protecting.

While politicians and anti-choice activists like to rail against women who seek abortions as doing so for “convenience”,  it has long been understood that the number one reason for abortion is unintended pregnancy.  In fact, women base their decisions largely on their ability to maintain economic stability and to care for the children they already have. With this in mind, it’s obvious that the most practical way to reduce the abortion rate is through prevention of unintended pregnancy.  Studies have shown that contraceptive use dramatically reduces unplanned pregnancy, which dramatically reduces abortion. Therefore, publicly funded family planning programs are essential to lower unintended pregnancy and abortion.  According to the Guttmacher Institute, absent publicly funded family planning services, the U.S. abortion rate would be nearly two-thirds higher than it currently is, and nearly twice as high among poor women.

Ironically, anti-choice leaders are trying to strip funding from family planning facilities while also limiting access to prescription contraceptives.  They prefer the wildly unsuccessful promotion of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, supplemented by limited access to effective contraception.  Look no further than Wisconsin’s infamous GOP controlled legislature for evidence.  In his budget proposal, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is trying to eliminate requirements that health insurance plans provide coverage for contraceptives, arguing that the state’s Contraceptive Equity law comprises an “unacceptable government mandate on employers with moral objections to these services,” and it “increases the cost of health insurance for all payers.”  In Montana, the Republican-controlled House has voted to cut nearly all federal and state family-planning funds from the state health care budget.  This trend is not limited to state legislatures.  Last month the Boehner-led House voted to eliminate not only a national family-planning program known as Title X, but also to deny Planned Parenthood any federal funds to provide preventative healthcare, lifesaving cancer screenings, breast exams, birth control, HIV testing, and testing and treatment for other sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

These bills are proof that anti-choicers could care less about “life”.  Rather than fund programs that save lives and prevent the need for abortion, they prefer to cut these programs all together in the name of “fiscal conservatism”.  Which brings us to another shameful layer of the anti-choice movement: A lack of coherance between abortion ideology and economic policy.  They hate abortion, but refuse to support any policies that would actually reduce the need for it, as well as social programs that would help the very children who’s lives they claim to be protecting.  And it’s all under the banner of “small government”.  It seems they are only interested in protecting “life” from conception to birth, but after a child is born, he/she is on their own.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his ilk are the living embodiment of this inconsistency.  They want to outlaw abortion to preserve “life”, yet they have no problem cutting $752 million from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), $1.1 billion from Head Start, or $210 million from the Maternal and Child Health Block Grants – all to “balance the budget”.  The House GOP is literally working to regulate vaginas, while simultaneously slashing funding for social programs that families, particularly children, depend on.

At every step, so called “pro-lifers” refuse to fund or even support the most basic preventative services that would actually reduce the need for abortions, while rejecting any and all programs aimed at helping these same women be effective parents to their children.  Which leaves me to conclude that these anti-choicers are simply old-fashioned Puritan-style anti-women, anti-baby, anti-family, anti-human scoundrels.