My Violent Death Is More Important Than Yours

Until today, I subscribed to the Consistent Life organization’s email newsletter “Peace and Life Connections.” I’m pro-life, believing that all life is sacred and that, in concert w/ Feminists for Life, abortion primarily means we as a society still aren’t doing enough for women and children. I also hold to a pro-life stance as an adoptee, born out of wedlock to a mother who with little choice in her day nurtured me to term and birthed me to life.  But today, I read this in issue #156, the April 19^th “Peace and Life Connections” newsletter:

It’s easy to account for why the outrage at the Boston Marathon got media coverage overshadowing the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Even though his 8 counts of murder (7 infants, 1 woman) and mass injury were greater than that at Boston, in Boston it was concentrated in time, new, and very public, whereas Gosnell’s carnage stretched over years and behind closed doors.

I immediately unsubscribed.  I mean seriously?  The pro-life movement is now resorting to death one-upmanship??  The deaths of an 8-year-old boy, a Chinese international graduate student, and a beloved young woman just getting started in her life are less newsworthy because fewer people died?  The young boy’s 6-year old sister losing her leg, his mother suffering brain trauma, and the many other amputations and injuries don’t deserve the media attention they received?  Seriously?

I detest the taking of innocent unborn infants’ developing lives, making these souls the enemy of women, hiding the reality of their slaughter in medical terms—embryo, fetus, abortion procedure.  That the U.S. annual abortion rate is still over 1 million is abhorrent, a sign as I see it that our society is dysfunctional to the core and has a whole lotta work to do on behalf of our women and children. 

But trivializing the carnage that took place in Boston as a pro-life argument—especially in a newsletter self-identifying as an organization of peace, life, and connection—is offensive and wholly inexcusable.  

I was already troubled by the silence of pro-life organizations at the extreme war on women waged over the past campaign year and still ongoing in many states.  It’s not just pro-choice advocates creating an adversarial relationship between women and their unborn babies.

Conservative, mostly male, state and federal policy makers are likewise arguing a similar dichotomy, with women the enemy of the unborn rather than the other way around.  Women are judged as virtually criminal & deadly perpetrators along w/ their health care providers, their bodies deserving invasive probing if not state prosecution and disciplinary action as well.
   
I kept looking and waiting for someone, anyone, in the pro-life movement to take a public stance against invasive proposals by 2012 candidates and state legislators.  I checked the Feminists for Life site just before writing this blog, hoping they'd of course take a stand for women, but if they have offered any public commentary, it's not clearly presented.  The silence, especially of feminist pro-life advocates—ostensibly equally pro-woman—is unacceptable.

Violence and brutality are intolerable wherever they occur, period.  There’s no violent death contest where some brutal deaths “win” and are more deserving of media attention, public response, and personal reflection than others.  On one of the news reports today, one of the reporters, commenting on the terrorist act at the Boston Marathon, suggested that such acts of less major terrorism (as contrasted for example w/ the 9/11 tragedies) are now a reality that we in the U.S. just need to get used to.

No.  We do not need to “just get used to it.”  We do not have to accept the violence infesting the global community in which we all live. We can choose to challenge it:  within our own lives and relationships, as well as together in our communities and in our world.  We can choose not to judge each other or other living beings as less deserving of life, as threatening, as enemies.
  

There are no easy answers to life’s complexities in a hurting world confronting all manner of violent trauma, suffering, oppression, brutality, intolerance, famine, war...  But non-violence is a choice.  And seriously exploring and pursuing non-violent solutions to the difficulties we share is our choice.