[Image source: marchforlife.ie]

One accusation that is continually levelled against pro-life people is that we don’t, in fact, believe that the unborn are our moral equals, with an equal right to life. Instead, pro-life people, whether they are willing to admit it or not, just want to control women. We are deeply suspicious of women being able to control their own lives, bodies, and reproduction, and instead want women to be subject to the choices of others (society, Church leaders, the State, their male relatives, etc) when it comes to these important topics. 

This tweet, which I’ve blogged about before, shows this mindset at work, but it’s hardly an isolated example. Many pro-choice people, for whatever reason, really can’t accept that pro-life people are actually driven by the desire to protect the right to life of fellow human beings, albeit very small and underdeveloped human beings. And if you really think that we can’t possibly be driven by a concern for the rights of unborn babies, then it makes perfect sense that you’d assume pro-life people are instead driven by a desire to control women and their bodies.

Could I ask you to stop for just a second, though, and ask yourself: what if we did believe that unborn babies are our moral equals. Don’t think about whether we’re right to believe that – I know you think we’re not, don’t worry! Just, put that aside for a second. Imagine, for one minute, that pro-lifers are for real. Imagine that we actually, genuinely, really believe that unborn babies are our moral equals, and that therefore abortion is the moral equivalent (not equivalent in every single way, just the moral equivalent) of infanticide. Just…think about that.A woman named Ciara O’Connor had that thought nearly ten years ago. It prompted her to produce an entire podcast in the run-up to the 2018 referendum. Here’s how she describes her reaction on seeing a “Love Both” bumper sticker in 2017:

The first thought I had was ‘Ugh, that is disgusting. What a bollocks’. I didn’t even see this person. I only saw the car, and I saw the sticker, and for some reason that day, I stopped myself in my tracks. I thought, ‘Wait a minute. I’m just after making a huge judgement here. I’m after making a judgement about the person who drives this car, a person who I haven’t even seen, who has not uttered a single word to me’…

The easiest thing in the world to do is to imagine the other side are all complete psychos. I know we’ve seen some pretty scary tactics employed, but surely, I thought, not everyone who refers to themselves as ‘pro-life’ is a troll, or a bully, or a bollocks. I thought, what if this person really believes that this little foetus is the next Irish captain? That that person is going to win the World Cup for Ireland? If they really believe that that little foetus is that person, not just the potential to be that person, but is that person, I can almost see where they’re coming from. If I just suspended my cynicism and thought, OK, maybe this particular sticker isn’t just a tactic, maybe this is what they truly believe. Maybe you can see why they’re fighting for their rights. It made me think for the first time ever: ‘God, I’d love to sit down and talk to this person’.

Ciara subsequently met and interviewed me for episode one of her podcast, and I remain grateful to her to this day for telling my story with such kindness and sensitivity. I was able to explain where I was coming from, and while I didn’t change her mind, she said I was really interesting, and that I had the most well-thought out position on abortion she had heard for a long time.

It was the conversation with Ciara, in large part, that encouraged me to get involved in The Minimise Project. I know that so many of you just don’t understand how we could think unborn babies are our equals. This is due, at least in part, to really horrible pro-life people who either think or, far more often, imply that women’s rights and autonomy don’t matter. I am sorry they do that. It’s wrong. I do my best to get them to stop.

But I don’t accept that a regular reader of this blog just can’t know or understand how someone could be pro-life because they believe unborn babies are our moral equals. Why? Because we’ve explained why. Again. And again. We’ve explained why we think a woman’s bodily rights do not override this moral equality. Again. And again. And again! We’ve explained why we think the foetus’s underdeveloped nature doesn’t justify abortion. We’ve explained why we think there’s more to moral status than consciousness. We’ve explained why, even if you’re still unsure, that even then, it’s prudent to give the pro-life side the benefit of the doubt. 

We are totally happy to engage with anyone, ever, on the substance of any or all of these arguments. We might be wrong – we’d love to learn if we are! But it’s not fair to accuse anyone at the Minimise Project of lying about our concern for the unborn in an attempt to control women. Writing several hundred posts over six years that explain our position is quite a bit of work, and quite honestly, we have better things to do with our time.

Ignorance is not an excuse, guys! We are for real in our beliefs regarding the unborn. If you don’t agree with us, fine – but it’s not acceptable to simply not believe us.

Muireann