I used to be a pro-choice conservative.
It was the mid-aughts, George W. Bush was president, and I strongly opposed the war in Iraq. I believed in protecting the Constitution, limited government, federalism, and other principles one might expect from a conservative, but being anti-war was a priority. I had voted for Pat Buchanan twice. Still, there weren’t many of us on the Right with those foreign policy views in those days.
Being pro-choice at the time, I had not thought much about the issue. It wasn’t my issue. I had friends and loved ones who had terminated their pregnancies. It certainly wasn’t anything to celebrate, for them or for myself.
The most I ever thought about or brought up the abortion issue back then was in foreign policy debates with fellow conservatives. I was in talk radio at the time, and those conversations would go something like this:
Me: The United States killed X number of kids today in Iraq.
Bush-Cheney conservative: We’re at war.
Me: But why? Is this a just war? What is our goal? Is it worth killing innocent children? Is this “pro-life”?
Bush-Cheney conservative: Collateral damage. Inevitable. Stuff happens.
Me: A 16-year-old getting pregnant happens, too.
Bush-Cheney conservative: That’s different.
Me: It is?
The other person would typically reply with some justification for why innocent lives lost in a war, even children’s, were justified, seemingly dehumanizing them to soothe their ideological position. They were dismissive about human lives abroad. That didn’t jibe with me.
I began to think more about the issue of life writ large — whether it was people caught in war, immigrants, racial or religious minorities, or, yes, the unborn. To do harm to any of them, or at least to do so with less conscience, begins with dehumanizing them. Dirty Muslims. Dirty immigrants. Dirty Jews. Insignificant, mere “fetuses.” “Clump of cells.”
I eventually came to the conclusion that I had dehumanized the unborn without even trying. It was just sort of the ethos and mindset of the age group and extended friend groups I belonged to, outside of conservative circles.
It dawned on me that being adamantly pro-choice necessitated believing that a new human being growing inside a woman wasn’t a human. It was something else. It had to be.
Most of those who are understandably upset right now about Roe v. Wade being overturned believe some version of this, refusing to humanize in any way the unborn. The dehumanization is key to their position. It’s the only way someone could say with a straight face, “If you don’t like abortion, don’t get one.”
Such a statement only acknowledges one human being. It must.
Like those who might have been dismissive about the deaths of children in war zones during the Bush era, most pro-choice advocates have to rearrange the morality of the life-taking in their heads to make it palatable.
It’s not a baby. It can’t be.
Since I became a libertarian, I vowed not to dehumanize anyone or any group ever again because that is where most evil begins. That includes the unborn.
The overturn of Roe was as shocking to me, as I’m sure it was to most of Generation X, millennials, Zoomers, and beyond because most of us couldn’t remember a time when it wasn’t the law of the land. But with all the complexities that will come with this decision, I hope that more people can at least face what abortion actually is: the taking of a human life.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
