I’m a creature of sonic evolution, dearest motherfuckers. A hand grenade with Luna moth wings. It’s rather ironic for a diagnosed agoraphobic but the only thing that’s evolved more than my fluid gender identity is my equally fluid ideology. In thirty short years I’ve evolved from indentured Catholic to agnostic existentialist to Gnostic Christian witch, from juvenile anarcho-punk to Bolivarian Bolshevik tankie to panarcho-syndicalist gadfly. One thing that hasn’t changed throughout this intellectual metamorphosis however is a life long devotion to the sanctity of life.
Being a far-left pro-lifer has always seemed like a contradiction to most of my ilk but it has always made perfect sense to me. Egalitarianism in all its dimensions has always been about the stewardship of the weak in humanity by the strong. I actually believe that my early pro-life values are largely responsible for informing my radicalism rather than contradicting it. In a strange bid of karma, the Catholic Church may have accidentally created this church-burning commie-pinko by instilling those values in me at an impressionable age. I guess you could say I did a reverse Dorothy Day, from devout do-gooder to bomb-throwing heretic, sunrise, sunset.
This doesn’t mean that I’m on the same page with the pro-life movement at large, not by a long shot. I personally find your average pro-lifer to be a self-serving, single-minded, chauvinistic, pig-fucker with a severe penile Napoleon complex. As much as I despise the idea abortion, I’ve come to the hard conclusion that you can’t regulate someone else’s body without creating a berth for tyranny too wide for any self-respecting anarchist to tolerate. My approach to the issue has essentially become one of harm reduction. Combat abortion by making it irrelevant through the proliferation of affordable alternatives like the morning after pill. I feel that with this issue the bulk of the pro-life movement has revealed themselves to be puritanical hypocrites, more concerned with policing behavior than creating viable alternatives for desperate young women. As two thirds of a female and a feminist to boot, I find this hypocrisy to be particularly hard to swallow. You don’t have to be pro-choice to recognize that a rape victim doesn’t deserve to be polluted by a monster’s progeny, you just have to not be a dick. A tall order for too many of my fellow pro-lifers.
But even this slut-shaming foot-shootout doesn’t rank as the greatest hypocrisy among the mainstream pro-life movement. That foul honor belongs to their blase attitude towards the mountains of dead children created by their sacred war machine. A quick glance at the voting records of the Bible Belt faithful on recent bills regarding America’s bloodbaths in Yemen and Afghanistan reveal this revolting hypocrisy in stark black and white. There are exceptions to this moral lapse, namely Rand Paul, a pro-life Republican who has been more consistent than most Democrats in his opposition to those desert holocausts. But by and large, the Republican corps of the pro-life movement in Washington has shown a totally callous indifference to our nation’s booming dead baby industry in the Middle East, provided that those tiny bodies are brown and Muslim. 50 thousand children have starved to death in Yemen in 2017 alone as a result of Saudi Arabia’s American sponsored blockade. Thousands more languish in the biggest Cholera outbreak in modern history. And where, in the name of god, is the fucking outrage?
Where is the outrage from my fellow pro-lifers on this merciless forever war on children? Where are all the marches of church going folk brandishing garish pictures of emaciated Zaydi corpses? Why aren’t the radicals blitzing the Saudi and Emirati embassies with buttaric acid stink bombs? Why aren’t the tongue-speaking pastors chaining themselves to the doors Las Vegas drone arcades? Nothing! Their silence would be deafening if it weren’t chimed out by their lifelong representatives on the Hill screaming like banshees for more bombs, more drones, more war, more dead babies. And these are the leaders of a movement committed to the sanctity of life? The keynote speakers at a yearly rally for life, along with their suddenly pro-life president who probably had a back-alley hanger-jockey on speed dial for the undocumented maids he molested.
This is a travesty of epic proportions, dearest motherfuckers. Either life is sacred or its not. You don’t get to have it both ways. You don’t get to call Planned Parenthood a terrorist organization one week, then ship guns to Saudi butchers the next. The only pro-life policy that makes any goddamn sense is a consistent one. That doesn’t just mean an end to abortion, but an end to the death penalty, drone strikes, sanctions, the slaughter of unarmed people of color and all the various industrial complexes that keep this toxic empire’s culture of death alive and well. You can’t be pro-life and pro-war. Even a contrarian Mothra like me can see that as plain as Godzilla’s green ass. Dorothy Day and the Berrigan brothers could too. It’s high time the rest of you crusaders woke the fuck up. No more dead babies. Not in wombs or tombs.
