While all of our signed blogs represent the views of the writer rather than the Minimise Project as a whole, I felt like this one could use an extra disclaimer: this is very much a Ben Take.

Pope Leo XIV was recently in the news weighing in on a decision by the Archbishop of Chicago to give Dick Durbin, a pro-choice Democratic senator, a lifetime achievement award. While not commenting on the details of the particular case, the Pope brought up some general principles:

Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but says I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” he said … “Someone who says that ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.

I’m not going to get into the Catholic-inside-baseball question of how to interpret the Pope’s remarks (did he mean ‘it’s fine to give pro-choice politicians awards and recognition if they’re good on these other things?’ or ‘Bishops should be unwilling to give pro-choice politicians awards and recognition, and just as unwilling to do so about these other issues’? The Pillar has a pretty insightful and fair-minded analysis).

I’m more interested in the general claim here. That to be “pro-life”  doesn’t just mean being anti-abortion, but something much “thicker”. Being pro-life should, the Pope seems to be saying, mean something like “being a consistent supporter of human dignity”. 

Now, I’m torn on this. Substantively, I completely agree with Pope Leo’s actual positions. I am a “consistent ethic of life” pro-lifer, a “whole-lifer”. I oppose the death penalty, I’m a strict believer in the standards of just war, I think the current US administration’s policies regarding immigration are often unjustified and inhuman. Also (I suspect) like the Pope, I think that abortion has a special place among the various human rights issues of our day: as I’ve written before, I think it is the pre-eminent one, the “burning question”. But I think opposition to abortion finds its best home alongside a whole lot of other pro-dignity positions from across the political spectrum.

I’m not convinced, though, that the best way to make the case for a “consistent ethic of life” is to bake all of that into the definition of “pro-life”.

The thing is, it would just be very handy to have a universally agreed-upon term meaning “thinks abortion is a human rights violation” and another meaning “thinks removing the option to have an abortion is a human rights violation.” That would leave people free to debate the merits of their positions on the merits, instead of engaging in semantic battles about whether someone even counts as pro-life if they don’t support x. If I’m arguing with someone who opposes abortion but supports the death penalty, I don’t think it’s helpful to describe them as “not really pro-life”. I’d rather stick to a “thinner” definition where pro-life just means anti-abortion, and then just make the arguments against the death penalty, or try to tease out out the specific inconsistencies I see in their position.

If I’m speaking about the issue in a different context (maybe I’m talking to a pro-choice person who opposes the death penalty) I’ll happily throw death penalty supporters under the bus: I am on the record as being a strong proponent of Virtue Signalling in the right contexts, and if I agree with my pro-choice interlocutor on the death penalty I want to make that maximally clear to them – all the better to make it easier for them to consider the possibility of agreeing with me on abortion. But I feel totally capable of casting death penalty supporters under the wheels of oncoming omnibuses without getting into a terminological battle about the meaning of the term “pro-life”. To do so just seems beside the point, and to me risks coming across as disingenuous. I know what my pro-choice conversation partner understands by “pro-life”: they understand “anti-abortion”. To insist that anyone who supports the death penalty isn’t really pro-life almost seems like I’m trying to dissociate myself from other members of the pro-life movement via rhetorical slight-of-hand. Better to just straightforwardly say why I think they’re wrong and inconsistent.

Or that’s what I think, anyway! Friends of mine who use “pro-life” in the more thick, “consistent ethic” sense manage to negotiate these kinds of situations fine, and as long as everyone is totally clear about what they mean by the words they’re using, it’s always possible to avoid confusion. But man, it would really be handy to have those simple terms denoting each side of the abortion debate, with no other connotations!

Now, “Pro-life” and “pro-choice” are not the terms I’d have picked for these purposes. They’re both vague euphemisms that are polemical rather than descriptive. Each is trying to frame their positions in the best possible way, and each has the annoying feature of being about supporting something that people on both sides of the abortion debate value. Pro-choice people don’t see themselves as anti-life, and pro-life people don’t see themselves as anti-choice. The terms tend to get people’s backs up, baking some of the worst features of the abortion debate right into the basic self-descriptions of each side.

It’s for that reason (among others) that I’ve been increasingly moving towards describing myself as “anti-abortion”, “against abortion”, or as “opposing abortion.” Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life agrees with me. If “pro-life” came to describe the “consistent ethic” position and the anti-abortion position was just labelled “anti-abortion” that would probably be my ideal.

But I am also a great believer in generally calling people what they want to be called. That means using “pro-choice” so as not to waste time further antagonising people I disagree with and make them less likely to be able to hear and listen to me. But it also means respecting the fact that the consensus term for my side of the abortion debate is “pro-life”, and accepting that’s the term that most anti-abortion people are most comfortable with using to describe themselves, whether or not they agree with me on other things.

So be it. But if that’s the case, I really do think it would be better to keep the term  just meaning “anti-abortion.” To see why, let’s think about the English MP William Wilberforce, perhaps the most famous anti-slavery campaigner in history. The term for being anti-slavery at the time was “abolitionist”. Now let’s head over to Wikipedia and have a look at some of Wilberforce’s other positions:

Wilberforce was opposed to giving workers’ rights to organise into unions, in 1799 speaking in favour of the Combination Act, which suppressed trade union activity throughout Britain, and calling unions “a general disease in our society”.[126][128] He also opposed an enquiry into the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in which eleven protesters were killed at a political rally demanding reform.[129] Concerned about “bad men who wished to produce anarchy and confusion”, he approved of the government’s Six Acts, which further limited public meetings and seditious writings.[130][131] Wilberforce’s actions led the essayist William Hazlitt to condemn him as one “who preaches vital Christianity to untutored savages, and tolerates its worst abuses in civilised states.”[132]

Wilberforce’s views of women and religion were also conservative. He disapproved of women anti-slavery activists such as Elizabeth Heyrick, who organised women’s abolitionist groups in the 1820s, protesting: “[F]or ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions—these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture.”[133][134] Wilberforce initially strongly opposed bills for Catholic emancipation, which would have allowed Catholics to become MPs, hold public office and serve in the army, although by 1813, he had changed his views and spoke in favour of a similar bill.[136]


The term for “anti-slavery” in Wilberforce’s time was “abolitionist”. Imagine if a pro-women’s suffrage, pro-Catholic-emancipation, pro-union, and pro-Peterloo-enquiry person had said in 1799 or so that Wilberforce’s views on these issues made him “not a true abolitionist”. I don’t think that would have been helpful! Wilberforce was a true abolitionist because “abolitionist” means “opposed to legal slavery”, and it was very useful to have a word that meant this. The thinner definition of abolitionism was clearer than a thick definition would have been.

What’s more, it was good for Wilberforce to have the position he did on slavery: his bad views on other questions may have reflected badly on him, but they didn’t in themselves do anything to discredit the abolitionist position. Similarly, it sucks that Ted Cruz or any generic Republican US senator supports the death penalty, but that fact doesn’t make opposing legal abortion bad – even if it makes Ted Cruz himself inconsistent or hypocritical. Different issues are different. What makes Cruz pro-life or not are his policies, statements, and actions on the question of abortion.

At least, I think that’s the most helpful way to use the words. To be clear, I don’t think Pope Leo or other proponents of the “thick” definition are wrong on the substance: based on what they mean by pro-life, I’m in agreement with them: I think consistent support for human dignity requires much more than only being anti-abortion (though it does require that). But I think “pro-life” has become a term with a contested definition, and that as long as different people mean different things by it it’s going to keep on generating confusion and preventing people from understanding one another. The only way to resolve that confusion would be to settle on one definition: this is me making my case for the thin one.

Ben