Today is the 31st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and the anti-choice crowd is having its annual rally to work to destroy the landmark decision. I say "anti-choice," though they call themselves "pro-life," and they call pro-choice citizens (most of America) "pro-abortion."

No one is "pro"-abortion. Abortion has always been with us, and it always will be. One of the causes of unwanted pregnancy in America is careless sexual behavior, to be sure, but there are many other causes: failure of birth control, rape (including marital rape, which is not uncommon, but which no one talks about), and sexual behavior performed by teenagers who have not been instructed in the proper use of birth control.

The term "pro-life" is just as absurd. If we interrupted the anti-Roe v. Wade rally and asked how many of the attendees favored capital punishment, we'd probably see a large number of hands go up (excluding those Catholics who follow the official condemnation of capital punishment). And some of those people would favor the death penalty even for adolescents.


More significant, if we asked what they were planning to have for dinner, most would probably say meat. So it is okay with them for a cow or a pig or a chicken to die, but not a fetus. And--let's look at the full picture--it's also okay for that cow or pig or chicken to be heinously tortured during its short lifetime. Probably many of the women would be wearing cosmetics made by companies that continue to do needless animal testing.

A pig is as important as a human? Putting aside the controversy over whether a fetus is a human being--that is not the issue. The issues are: 1. Who are we to determine which creatures are more important than others? and 2. Most definitely, a pig's suffering is as important's as a human's, no matter what we believe the heirarchy of creature importance is. A lonely rabbit in a cage, its eyes burning with acid, hurts just as much as you do if you are isolated in a cage with acid tossed into your eyes.

The hallmark of the anti-choice movement is its desire to deny self-determination to women, not any true desire to respect and protect life.