Can We Stop Calling It ‘Pro‑Life’
What I Hear When You Say You’re ‘Pro‑Life’
Anytime I hear a politician say they are “pro‑life,” my whole body tenses. I already know what’s coming next. They’re about to tell me they’re against abortion, and for them, that’s where the conversation about life starts and ends. Not once do they follow it up with, “and that’s why I’m fighting for healthcare, or a living wage, or paid time to recover from birth.” It’s always the same narrow script: control the pregnancy, control the body, full stop.
What makes me craziest is how casually we’ve all learned to accept that. “Pro‑life” has become this magic label people can slap on themselves to sound moral and compassionate, even as they back policies that make actual living harder and more dangerous. We’ve let a marketing slogan stand in for a serious moral position, and we’ve let people hide inside that slogan while they vote, over and over again, against the things that keep families and kids alive.
That’s the gap I want to sit with for a minute, the gap between the PR version of “pro‑life” and the actual policies that come attached to it. Because once you start lining those up side by side, it gets very hard to pretend this is about cherishing life at all.
This isn’t pro‑life. It’s pro‑control.
If this were actually about life, you’d see it in every other policy they back. You wouldn’t watch the same people who brag about being pro‑life turn around and vote to defund healthcare, slash food assistance, and starve housing programs that literally keep families alive. You wouldn’t see them block increases to the minimum wage, shrug at the cost of childcare, and ignore postpartum support like it’s some kind of luxury instead of basic survival. You wouldn’t see a movement that screams about babies in the womb and then fights against paid parental leave, or even meaningful unpaid leave, once those babies are here and need care. That’s not a culture of life. That’s a culture of forced birth, and then you’re on your own.
What really drives this home for me are the people who say, “I won’t vote for a politician if they aren’t pro‑life,” and every single time, what they mean is: anti‑abortion. They rarely, if ever, mean, “I won’t vote for someone who opposes food assistance, or who wants to cut healthcare, or who doesn’t care if mothers are pushed back to work two weeks after a C‑section.” Their moral test begins and ends with whether a politician will use the power of the state to control pregnant bodies. That’s the axis everything spins on. And I’m tired of pretending this is about some noble love of life when the actual record is a long list of ways to make living harder, sicker, poorer, and more precarious for the people they claim to protect.
What a truly pro‑life agenda would actually look like
If you really care about life, your politics has to stretch further than the inside of a uterus. A genuinely pro‑life agenda would start with the basics: making sure people can see a doctor, afford to eat, safely give birth, and not be forced into medical decisions by politicians who have never once sat in that exam room. It would care about the pregnant person, the baby, and the family long after the campaign ad is over.
For me, that starts with universal healthcare. Call it Medicare for All, call it single‑payer, call it whatever you want, but if you are willing to let people avoid the doctor because they’re afraid of a bill, you are not pro‑life. Universal healthcare means prenatal care that catches complications early. It means mental health support when pregnancy or birth cracks someone open. It means not having to choose between seeing an OB and keeping the lights on. If your “pro‑life” worldview accepts medical bankruptcy as the cost of having a child, it’s not about life. It’s about maintaining a system where suffering is a feature, not a bug.
A pro‑life agenda would also insist on a livable wage. It’s not pro‑life to demand people bring children into a world where working full‑time still leaves you standing in line at the food bank. If parents are stuck in impossible math: rent or groceries, childcare or car payment, that is not a culture that honors life; it’s a culture that grinds people down and then blames them for being tired. A livable wage doesn’t just “help the poor.” It actually eases the pressure on programs like SNAP and welfare by giving families enough breathing room instead of constantly drowning. If you won’t fight for wages people can live on, don’t lecture them about being not being “open to life.”
Then there’s postpartum care, which our system treats like an optional add‑on, if it thinks of it at all. A truly pro‑life country would not send someone home with a newborn and a stitched‑up body and then disappear. It would guarantee follow‑up care, pelvic floor therapy, depression and anxiety screening, paid time to heal and bond, and real support for non‑birthing parents too. It wouldn’t expect someone to be back at work in two weeks, bleeding through their clothes and pretending they’re fine because their boss doesn’t believe in “special treatment.”
And yes, a truly pro‑life agenda would include safe, legal abortion access. Because if we agree there is an ethics to medical care, then we should be able to agree that no ethical doctor performs procedures that harm their patients. Decisions about whether to continue a pregnancy, especially when there are complications, violence, or sheer exhaustion in the background, belong between a patient and their doctor, not on the floor of a state legislature. Protecting that space is pro‑life, because it says: your life, your health, your future, your trauma story all matter more than a politician’s need to feel righteous.
So, when I hear someone say “pro‑life,” this is what I think of. I think of the woman who skips prenatal appointments because the copay is too high. I think of the teenager forced to carry the pregnancy of her abuser. I think of the parent working two jobs and still choosing between formula and rent. I think of the person in the recovery room after an abortion or a miscarriage, wondering if they’re going to be judged more harshly by their church than by their doctor. A politics that is truly pro‑life would be built to catch all of them. Anything less is just pro‑control dressed up in Sunday language.
Where I’m going next
The thing is, none of this language exists in a vacuum. “Pro‑life” didn’t just appear out of thin air; it was built, polished, and preached until it felt holier than it actually is. Politicians didn’t come up with this branding on their own. They had a lot of help from pastors, media personalities, and entire church cultures that taught people to reduce a whole moral universe down to a single checkbox on abortion.
This is where I want to go next. Because if we’re going to stop letting “pro‑life” be a free pass for pro‑control politics, we also have to talk honestly about the pulpits, Bible studies, and Christian talking points that keep this hypocrisy alive. In my next piece, I want to look at how those messages were shaped, how they’ve been used to keep people in line, and what it might look like to finally say: I’m done calling this faith, and I’m done calling this pro‑life.