what it really means to be pro-life or pro-death

A friend of mine asked me to comment a little bit on something that I posted recently you know I’ve been talking about pro-life issues for a while.

listen on the podcast or read transcript below.
https://open.spotify.com/show/4uoQIaWng5P4G1ygXBvbHq

It’s one of the many issues that I actually had initially with the evangelical Church back in my high school and college days trying to kind of wrap my brain around the disconnect I felt between, this purity culture and, you know, don’t have sex before marriage and then, if you do, and then you end up pregnant and then, you have to have the baby and so now you’ve affected your whole life and your baby’s life. And then, of course, there’s the, well, if you can’t raise the baby, then put your baby up for adoption. 
And as an adoptee, like, I’ve been adopted and I always had concerns about that rhetoric. And, if I expressed any anything along those lines, I was always labeled as someone who was disgruntled and ungrateful, right? A lot of a lot of things were attributed to me as a result. 
So I just kept my mouth shut most of the time.

And then I also had this experience in college one time. I went with my church to a march for life rally and partly because I just wanted to go and see what was happening. 
And of course, I was raised in this environment where abortion was absolutely the worst thing that anyone could do, right? And, you know, people were called the baby killers and just all kinds of hateful things. And I always had this sense of this can’t be the only way to approach this. 
It can’t be. Of course, it’s not.

But yeah, I went through this period of time where I was curious, I wanted to engage better in the conversation that we were having around abortion and so pro-life… that label of pro-life has always been kind of problematic for me, especially when, I remember going to that march for life and seeing some of the posters and signs that people had and just how hateful and violent they were and it just struck me as odd because are we pro-life or are we just pro-fetus, right? 
Like there’s definitely that disconnect. It’s like, it sounds like you’re okay with harming people who don’t agree with you and and throwing violence and murder and killing into people’s faces in order to prove a point. I was really struck by that as a kid you know I was you know 18 19 years old at the time and it really struck me as ironic, maybe like just trying to fight fire with fire kind of approach to abortion

and as I dug in more and I started reading and I started trying to understand the issues around abortion and realized how they were much more layered than people want them to be. You know, for basic, basic understanding of what abortion even is and how it’s classified often gets lost and then the ultimate kind of narrative, that pro-lifers tend to have is that it always focuses on the women who just accidentally get pregnant and then don’t want a baby and that’s very much their focus. 
It’s that demographic that they’re focused on when the reality is that demographic is incredibly small and shrinking and it shrunk drastically because of things like the feminist movement and understanding pregnancy and understanding women’s bodies and understanding the, you know, getting women educated and saying, you can take precautions. If you are sexually active, allowing women to make those choices for themselves and providing after-care for when things like rape happens and when women feel trapped by their own bodies because they have to then make the horrible decision of carrying a rapist’s baby to term.

So there’s so many other stories that I never heard from Pro-Lifers, that I never heard in church. 
I never heard about, you know, the literally thousands of women who get raped every year by good Christian men. I never heard about those stories… for reasons, right?! There are reasons we don’t hear those stories at pro-life rallies.

So the people who claim to be pro-life… there’s also this branch of, in 2020, when we heard the replies to Black Lives Matter, suddenly all lives matter and again, it gets conflated with this pro-life movement that we care about people’s lives. And in 2020, I very much saw this distance between do we care about ALL lives enough to not meet together in person until we figure out if that’s OK, if that’s safe to do? Do we care enough about life and the quality of life to understand the restrictions about not letting people -just anybody- walk into nursing homes? Do we understand what we didn’t know from the onset of COVID what could happen? 
We were still researching and figuring that out and taking precautions.

And some people didn’t like the precautions and they made them uncomfortable or it’s, you know, made a dent in their profit margins. And so then we had to have this conversation about, do you really believe in the dignity and sanctity of life? 
So much so that every single life does matter that every, I mean, if we saved one person, that it was worth the effort.

Because that’s where the pro-life arguments tend to fall apart, isn’t it? They tend to fall apart in the places where you know, the pro-life folks they just, they just reveal themselves. 
Yes, every baby matters and I happen to personally believe that life begins at conception and I also personally believe that women should be educated and given resources to more fully understand their own bodies, the effects and impacts of their choices and be able to make decisions for themselves in ways that are actually healthy and safe for them while also given resources to make decisions and to support them in whatever decisions they make, we make, myself included.

So when I say that there are some pro-lifers that really turned out to be pro-deathers, what we’re also seeing right now right now in 2025… we’re seeing rhetoric that comes out that actually implies and sometimes states, just outright statements, that tell us that certain people are not worth the effort to keep alive.

and here’s a here’s what I mean: take for example people who come here to this country from other countries, war torn countries where they are seeking asylum from the conditions that threaten their lives, whether it’s food security, violence, political violence, gang activity, etc., they come here to this country because they feel safer here and they know that they’ll be safer here then sending them back to their countries. We know for a fact that we are sending them back into a highly dangerous risky environment where there is a much higher chance of them being killed, or dying for healthcare reasons, dying for any number of factors. When we know that we have the resources to keep people alive longer and then we deny them those resources, how is that not killing them?

now you can argue that it’s not intentional or that it’s not actively killing someone. you’re not actually the one who’s pulling the trigger, but if you know someone’s coming for someone. you know someone is coming for your neighbor with a loaded gun with the intention of killing your neighbor and you do nothing, does that not make you complicit in any way? culpable, if you stand there and you watch it happen? and you might say “why? I don’t have to be the one to stand in front of the bullet.” No, but there are other things you can be doing.

And I can’t help but think this. I wasn’t raised with the Westminster standards and I didn’t know what the catechism really said until I was an adult, I mean in my 30s when I actually read the catechism for myself. but the Westminster Catechism is fairly clear on what it means by “thou shalt not kill.” They lay out a definition of murder that Jesus himself implied when he said “you may have heard that you shouldn’t kill, but I say”…and what does Jesus say? “Don’t even hate your brother. Don’t even hate people because then you’re just as guilty.” And you can have lots of good upright citizens (upright upstanding whatever) who will say, “well I don’t hate anybody.” OK well the catechism goes further in defining what it means to murder and it includes things like if you don’t do whatever is in your capacity to stop a murder or you don’t do the things that you know will add to the years and the quality of life for others. 
It’s our job. It’s what we do. It’s who we are as as a church. 
It’s what the kingdom of God is built on. We do the things that sustain life, not take it away.

and starting to unpack what that looks like in our society right now here, for such a time as this, it’s gonna get messy. It is absolutely gonna get messy.

and one more thing I’ll close with this. you know in my mind, let me be careful here, in my mind, even if you disagree with me on, you know, who the sinners are and who the heathens are, right? 
Let’s say that you have the choice to save someone who agrees with you and has all the Christian morals and standards that you have or to save a person who has none of the Christian morals that you have and deeply believes that you can do whatever you want. Don’t wouldn’t you want to save the first person and not I’m sorry wouldn’t you want to save to protect and keep the second person from dying in that moment because you don’t know if that person is gonna go to heaven or hell for all eternity and if you believe that that person is gonna go to hell, don’t you want to save their lives? Don’t you want to give them more time? 


Like if we really believed that these people are all going to hell for all eternity, wouldn’t you want to do everything you can to keep them alive long enough for them to have an experience of the good news of Christ? like I don’t understand how you can rationalize wiping out all these people who you think are going to spend eternity in hell. like I’ll never understand that mentality. It’s evil. It’s actually evil. 
It is God’s will for none to perish. That has to be our will as well. I want that to be my will. I want none to perish. 
I want zero people in hell, don’t you?

and what kind of person takes delight in the idea of someone burning in hell, tormented for all eternity? What kind of person are you? If that’s something that you’re looking forward to? I don’t yeah… no I’m sorry. 
I don’t wanna have very much to do with people like that anymore. It scares the crap out of me. I want to do everything within my power to keep that from happening and to show people a better way. like … I’m not saying and this is a whole other podcast. .. I’m not saying that I necessarily even 100% believe in hell as a concept for all eternity. But again, that’s another conversation for another day … but let’s say it is. let’s say it is a thing. 
I want to be part of the group that does all we can to keep that from happening and to help people have as much time here on Earth to come to know the Jesus that I know, the Jesus who came not to condemn me, but to save me that that’s my heart.

and so I’d like to say that I am pro-life, but I can’t use that. I can’t use that term. It’s not who I am I mean the way that it’s defined for most people. 
It’s not really her life at all. So that’s what that meant.