Anti-choice Organizations
Published by Antigone July 12th, 2008 in Punkass!I am pro-choice, which should be as no surprise. In the area I am in, most people are anti-choice (which again, should be no surprise*). Of my group of friends I have, a plurality are apathetic (some violently so), the next highest group is anti-choice, a few are in the wishy-washy “well, it shouldn’t be used as birth control, but it should be legal group”, and the minority is pro-choice. I’m considered somewhat of an extremist, but hey, why should this be any different from any other political belief?
Anyway, one of my friends is pro-choice, but only vaguely so. In his metric, gun rights are far more important than people’s reproductive rights**. One time we were having a discussion, and I was trying to make the argument that “Pro-life” organizations are actually anti-women and anti-sex, as most of them are for abstinence only education and anti-contraception, and do not support anti-poverty measures.
He said that while there were extreme organizations who took up a lot of the media, he was sure that most “pro-lifers” were not like that, and that most of the pro-life organizations could not be like that. I had no proof.
And he had me there. I had no proof- I’ve never actually counted how many “Pro-life” organizations were against contraception and such.
But, thanks to the power of the internet, that is about to change for you and me. Wikipedia lists 40 “Pro-life” organizations, so, I will in the next few posts, I will investigate each organization, and determine which percentage of them believe what. I will also include a post on the five most populous organizations, and what they support and don’t support.
I will seeing which organizations are: explicitly Christian, if they support contraceptives or not, if they support abstinence-only education or not, if they speak to welfare support, if they are violent or peaceful, and if they are lead by a man or a woman. Please include anything else that should be included in the comments.
*I have a great story about the local anti-choicers, and how screwed up the label “pro-life” is at my blog.
**To be fair, he feels that reproductive rights are fairly bullet proof compared to his ability to get a handgun. (Pun intended).
Actually, the right question to ask is “How many ‘pro-life’ organizations support contraception?”, because few if any do support the main way to prevent abortion. Your friend stumped you because he asked the wrong question. You need to turn that stuff around on people. Even the most “left”-leaning “pro-life” organization—Feminists For Life—refuses to support contraception. If the most left-leaning of them won’t support contraception, then clearly the question to ask is not to prove they’re against it, but for him to prove (he can’t) they’re for it.
To bolster your point, I’d also present information to him about what crisis pregnancy centers tell women that are already pregnant. They tell them a) don’t kill your baby and b) once this crisis is over, don’t use contraception. Usually the rationale is that it doesn’t work anyway, but it’s important to note that their on the ground “ministry” is anti-contraception, which is also reflected in the abstinence-only materials.