It is with great joy, this year, that I have seen the expansion of human rights for our LGBTQ brothers and sister, and with great sorrow that I have seen the erosion of many rights for women and girls. The movement that seeks to deny these rights calls itself "pro-life", but an analysis of the facts shows that, even when one considers the stated aim of "saving babies" (actually, zygotes and fetuses are a little more to the point), their methods fail.
First, let's start with the idea that banning abortion reduces or ends the practice. That is simply not the case. Harsh bans have no effect on abortion rates (please see: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/01/19/407155/no-link-between-restrictive-abortion-laws-abortin-rates/ as an example). Second, as part of the Republican narrative against the Affordable Care Act, they claim that coverage for abortions and contraception will cause the abortion rate to skyrocket, when, in fact, it has had the opposite effect (please see: http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/6501/barack_obama,_pro-life_hero_/ ) Thus, even by the "pro-life" movement's stated aim, their methods make it more likely, and not less likely, that a fetus or zygote will be aborted.
This is simply the practical standpoint, and the ability of the movement to achieve its stated goal. From a human rights standpoint, the picture is even grimmer. Women are, effectively, required to be organ donors to a fetus. Recently, in Nebraska a foster child was ordered to submit to the religious desires of her foster parents, and not to have an abortion. What this says is that this child must, against her will, submit to a medical option which is ten times more likely to kill her than the medical option she would like to choose, and is forced to donate an organ against her will. Had this been a foster boy, ordered to donate a partial liver or kidney, one could hardly imagine the outrage, but because this is a pregnant girl, it merits hardly a whimper, it seems: (http://www.chron.com/news/article/Neb-high-court-nixes-teen-s-request-for-abortion-4869315.php ) The "fetal personhood" movement would, effectively, give pregnant women fewer rights than a corpse. (credit for this observation goes to a creative signmaker) One is required to receive consent from family members to harvest organs from a corpse, yet a pregnant woman (or little girl) would be legally required to donate her uterus to a fetus, regardless of the consequences to her life or health.
Make no mistake, this has serious health consequences for women, as Ireland showed us last year: (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/14/savita-halappanavar-death-irish-woman-denied-abortion-dies_n_2128696.html ) There was no way to save her child, but Savita could have been saved. The question we all must ask is, if our daughter miscarries, do we want to hug her, or bury her?
It is horrifying in a free society to mandate doctors give inaccurate, misleading or false information, or to suggest we perform unnecessary medical procedures which meet the legal definition of rape (http://www.guttmacher.org/media/nr/2006/10/26/index.html , http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/03/transvaginal-ultrasounds-coming-soon-state-near-you ) for a subset of our population to exercise their constitutional rights, yet this is just what the anti-choice movement has done.
Clearly, the goal of this movement is not to prevent abortion, save babies, and certainly not to help women. It is to control women. They have no moral high ground on which to stand, and if they want to see a "baby-killer", by their own definition, they need look no further than the nearest mirror.
