How prolifers actually live out their beliefs

“to understand how seamlessly and humbly we actually live out our belief in the sanctity of human life” – Pterodactyl, on FamilyLifeNZ

On Nov 6 2010, a Walgreens pharmacist in Boise, Idaho – apparently one of those prolifers “living out his belief seamlessly and humbly in the sanctity of human life” received an order for a prescription for Methergine, a medicine used to prevent or control bleeding of the uterus following childbirth or an abortion. She asked the Planned Parenthood nurse practitioner whether this was for a patient who had had an abortion, and in accordance with the HIPAA Privacy Act, the nurse refused to tell her and asked for a referral to a pharmacist who would fill the prescription. The prolifer hung up.

To Pterodactyl, and to other followers on that blog who approve of pharmacists being legally entitled to deny women contraception or medical aftercare in order to “seamlessly and humbly” show how much they support “the sanctity of human life”: the patient’s privacy was not deserving of respect. To prolifers, women who might have had abortions aren’t entitled to medical privacy: women aren’t entitled to freedom of conscience. Women aren’t entitled to respect or dignity.

The pharmacist might seem arrogant and brutally uncaring as he put the phone down on a patient who was bleeding and might die, but really, to if you’re Pterodactyl, that’s just seamlessly humble behavior. Because letting a woman bleed to death is the way “to live out your belief in the sanctity of human life”.

This is part of the issue that the Catholic Church objected to when Amnesty International decided to support the right of women who had been raped to abortions and to medical aftercare: to AI, a human rights organisation, a girl or a woman who has been forced to have sex has the right to decide to have an abortion, and whether or not the abortion is legal, to have aftercare post-abortion. To the Catholic Church, it is only right for women to risk death in illegal abortions, and to be denied healthcare for complications afterwards. And this is what Pterodactyl calls “respecting the sanctity of human life”.

Following on to the conclusion: prolifers are llying hypocrites, or prolifers believe women aren’t human, and so aren’t included in the “sanctity” clause.

Invitation to a prolife Pterodactyl to debate basic human rights

As MTV’s recent documentary on abortion demonstrated, “abortion is common despite the silence around it, it’s not an easy decision, it’s extremely safe, and most women who do it really think long and hard about their decisions”.

In a recent debate on a prolife site, a prolifer who had previously made clear they support human rights regardless of sexual orientation, came out solidly against human rights regardless of gender, arguing that a “subset of humanity” (that is, each individual pregnant woman) ought not to be allowed to be the only people allowed to make decisions about abortion.
My position never changed from the statement I made early-on in the debate:

I think it’s even simpler than trying to mess around with definitions about “potential humans”, etc.

A woman is a human being. No one has a right to use her body against her will. Not even to keep another human being alive.

All prolife legislation and ethics rest on the idea that a woman isn’t really human: she’s just an incubator that can be used without her consent to make a fertilized egg into a baby, regardless of what damage this does to her. This dehumanization of women is what is profoundly wrong with the prolife ethos.

During the discussion, Pterodactyl asserted: “It is not interesting to you to know how a person can be queer, a defender of life at its incarnation and a religious rebel.”

I offered to provide a post where Pterodactyl could, if desired, defend the division between human rights for pregnant woman (not permitted by prolifers) and human rights for LGBT people (most prolifers are against this, too, simply because prolife is generally a religious/anti-human rights movement, though I’ve encountered prolifers who were surprisingly gungho about equal rights for gay men and almost-equal rights for lesbians).

To begin, then: here are the basic human rights violated by the prolife belief that the state, not the individual pregnant woman, has the right to decide if a woman shall terminate or continue a pregnancy.

The big one that prolifers violate by their belief women ought not to be allowed to decide whether to terminate or continue is of course Article One, but there are 11 other Articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that prolife beliefs oppose.

Nowhere in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is there found any Article that prolifers claim is a human right for fetuses only: the right to make use of someone else’s body against her will in order to stay alive.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

(behind a cut, since I suspect it’s of not much interest to anyone but me)