In a rare, refreshing instance of someone other than the pro-life blogosphere telling pro-abortion extremists to grow up, Kyle Lorey has a column at Odyssey this week making the case that abortion defenders should stop calling pro-lifers “anti-choice.”
After explaining his decision to not state his own position on abortion in hopes of keeping readers on either side from reading his critique through a predetermined lense, Lorey writes that the label needlessly gets in the way of having productive conversations about abortion and potentially finding areas of compromise…
If the left wishes to advance their cause, they needn’t focus on overturning the entire moral viewpoint of pro-lifers—such an approach is doomed to failure. Instead, they should focus on the nitty-gritty; this allows the debate to focus on specifics and pragmatics as opposed to sweeping generalities about the inherent immorality of the opposing side. If both sides can forget those huge differences, real discourse about state and federal policy can be achieved. Toward this end, divisive rhetorical tools should be curtailed—including the terming of pro-lifers “anti-choice.” If a Republican who wished to compromise with the Democrats referred to them as “communist swine” while discussing policy with them, everyone would be much less willing to even begin to engage.
This is all true enough; there are some things that well-meaning people on both sides should be able to agree on, like actual women’s health care, basic protection for infants who survive abortions, giving abortion-minded and post-abortive women support instead of punishment, and requiring common-sense medical standards to protect women from so-called “medical practitioners” who don’t have their best interests at heart.
Conservative Standards 