Let's rename Pro-Life

Let’s call Pro-Life what it really is: Partial-Life. Its single objective is for every pregnancy to produce a live infant. That’s it. Whether the infant dies shortly after, whether the mother survives, whether the mother can provide for a child – none of that matters to the so-called Pro-life movement. I don’t call that Pro-Life and neither should you.

I’m for Full-Life, where the objective is for a healthy pregnancy producing a healthy infant, who will go into a family fully able to support it. The Partial-Life movement solely campaigns to end abortion. Their dirty secret: the medical facilities that provide abortion services – such as Planned Parenthood – were the major ones providing reproductive health services, particularly for the lower income class, the ones most in need of it. As a result, U.S. reproductive health services have been gutted. A fit analogy would be “throwing the baby out with the bath water.”

So, thanks to the Partial-Life movement, our country has the dubious distinction of having the highest infant mortality rate and highest maternal mortality rate of any developed nation in the world. The standard measure for infant mortality is the number of deaths of infants less than one year old per 1,000 live births. In 2020, our infant mortality rate was 5.4, while the rates for some other developed countries were less than half of ours, like Sweden at 2.15 and Finland at 1.88.

Maternal mortality refers to deaths due to complications from pregnancy or childbirth. The standard measure is deaths per 100,000 live births. In 2020 (latest date available), our maternal mortality rate was 21, while the UK’s was 10 and Germany’s was only 4!

What do those developed countries have that we don’t have? For one thing, they all have that awful, terrible socialized healthcare.

John H. Terrell