A “pro-life” organizer working with the Texas-based group 40 Days for Life recently staged 40 days of prayer vigils outside Health Imperatives, the only reproductive health clinic on Cape Cod. She is supported by several Catholic churches that are behind the move to bring a “crisis pregnancy center” to Hyannis. Donations collected by these churches brought the anti-abortion Your Options Medical mobile ultrasound unit here.
In the six weeks of our standouts to support Health Imperatives, we witnessed how the 40 Days for Life organizer stirred tensions between the two opposing groups, verbally harassing and gesticulating behind the backs of pro-choice demonstrators, and on two occasions coming so close as to make physical contact. Alternating between quoting scripture and name-calling, she encouraged others to do the same. For the most part, the others quietly prayed.
Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, half of U.S. states have implemented total or near-total abortion bans. The anti-abortion movement has now turned its sights to states like Massachusetts.
Shaming patients and staff at health centers or enabling nonmedical crisis pregnancy centers is not pro-life. The money that parishioners spent on the mobile ultrasound unit would have been better spent on actually helping women with the costs of an unplanned pregnancy. Praying for 40 days in front of a clinic does not address the expense of raising a child or the very real dangers of carrying a child to term in our country’s tangled health-care system. Maternal mortality in the U.S. is double that of any other developed country.
Being pro-life should mean more than praying or haranguing vulnerable people. The things that are at the root of the need for abortion must be addressed. Banning abortion won’t stop it. The countries with the strictest abortion bans have the highest abortion rates.
The Netherlands has the lowest number of abortions in the world. It also has universal health care and free birth control, comprehensive sex education (resulting in Dutch teenagers delaying first sexual encounters), generous paid parental leave, and support for new mothers. In the U.S., the states that have adopted the Affordable Care Act have fewer abortions. In 2010, the U.S. counties adopting Obama-era programs addressing teen pregnancy saw a 3-percent drop in abortions before the programs were killed by the Trump administration. In Colorado, abortions and teen pregnancies declined by half after implementing comprehensive family planning and free birth control.
Being pro-life should mean voting for politicians who support the programs that other modern, developed countries routinely offer — that stop people from facing unplanned pregnancies and provide help when they do. This should be the subject of public discourse, but such discourse becomes impossible with religious extremists who believe they are proprietors of truth and everyone else is beneath them and wrong.
Laurie Veninger lives in North Truro and is a member of Indivisible Mass Coalition’s Feminist Action Team.
