Why Pro-Life and Anti-Choice Are Not Synonyms

In politics, you always want the best-sounding terms on your side. Who wouldn't support a Clean Air Act? "Privatized social security" has a better ring to it than "we spent all the money and now you can fend for yourself." And there's the power of acronyms -- the full title for the USA PATRIOT Act might be beastly long, but nobody wants to do something silly like protect civil rights and be deemed unpatriotic.

But this isn't politics, it's a blog! Journalists should be accurate. Yet when people read the Women's Rights blog and see the term "anti-choice," they figure it's our progressive bias. We're picking terminology that we like. And yes, people comment on it from time to time, so I'd like to set the record straight. We have a standard here under which we try to be as accurate as possible, deliberately using anti-choice when correct and pro-life when correct.

People who want to turn back Roe v. Wade, to deprive women of the right to choose to have an abortion, are anti-choice. (We can also correctly say anti-reproductive rights, but that's more of a mouthful.) The motivation behind this agenda -- whether it be the belief that life begins at conception or a twisted desire to control women -- is irrelevant. The issue at stake is their stance that women do not have the right to control their own bodies, that they are not permitted to make a choice about whether or not they want to serve as an incubator and then give birth to a baby. It's the kind of slippery slope that leads to confining pregnant women against their wills.

Now, the term pro-life has its problems in suggesting that some opponent is anti-life, or making the term about a fetus rather than the death penalty, war, poverty, disease, etc. However, I am generally willing to accept the limited definition of pro-life as believing that life begins at conception, and thus abortion is wrong, as reasonably accurate for communication. This is a stance that I respect, even if I do not agree. It does not necessarily entail opposition to the right to choose, a stance I have zero respect for.

One of my closest friends is firmly pro-life. She is a Catholic who believes that life begins at conception and that abortion is wrong. She believes that she could never have an abortion herself, and certainly doesn't want other women having abortions either, so you might also accurately refer to her as anti-abortion. Yet she is not anti-choice; she is pro-choice. She knows that her opposition to abortion does not justify legislating control over other women's bodies. A pro-life, anti-abortion, pro-reproductive rights, pro-choice person joins the rest of the reproductive rights movement in trying to reduce the need for abortion, through actions such as increasing accessibility to birth control, addressing economic constraints, or supporting adoption.

When you're reading this blog, you'll see the term anti-choice 99 percent of the time, because that's the stance we have a bone to pick with. We are almost never addressing the pro-life view, since that perspective is not the problem for women's rights. You can be pro-life and pro-women. You cannot be anti-choice and pro-women. That's our distinction, and that's why we will not inaccurately refer to a group, individual, or movement as "pro-life," no matter what they dub themselves, when the problem is that they're "anti-choice."

Photo credit: Steve Rhodes