Video Transcript

-The Pro-Life Reply to, "You're not Pro-Life, just Pro-Birth"

Brandi Swindell - Stanton

"You're not pro-life, you're just pro-birth!" Ever hear that?

(show a collection of tweets and headlines with this theme)

I’ve heard this criticism in numerous iterations throughout the years. Pro-lifers care SO much about the fetus before birth, but they don't give a rip about lives after they are born, usually because they don't support... x, y, or z government policy. What if the child has a low quality of life? What if the child is growing up in poverty? What if the child is homeless and starving? You guys are hypocrites.

I’m here to give you three reasons this argument doesn’t hold up.

Number 1.

Pro-lifers focus on birth because it is the most pressing issue.

Saying pro-lifers “You're just pro-birth”, is like saying to a heart surgeon, "You don't care about health overall, you just care about people's hearts!"

Preborn children are the only group of innocent human beings that it is legal to kill. Not only that, but they are being killed at a rate of over 2000 children per day in the United States. That’s way more than heart disease, which the CDC says is the leading cause of death in the United States, and even more than COVID-19 in its peak year of 2021.

Being pro-life means supporting every innocent human being's right not to be killed. The right to one’s own life is the foundation of every other right, because if someone can just kill you, they are effectively taking away all your other rights at the same time. Since preborn children are the only group of people to whom this right is not afforded in the United States, birth itself becomes by default the focus of anyone who supports the right to life.

Number 2.

You don’t have to alleviate every hardship people may face in order to try and save their lives.

Imagine a team of firefighters gets an emergency call for a family trapped inside a burning house. They aren’t going to say, “Well, unless we can provide food, lodging and a good college education for the kids once we save this family, we should probably just let ‘em die.” They are going to do their best to save those people, and they will be good people for saving them even if the firefighters don’t provide new housing for the family after saving them. The fact that the family might face many hardships after they are saved, in no way means they should be left to die.

Now, people are absolutely right to think about the surrounding issues that pressure parents into abortion. Nearly 9 in 10 women who abort are unmarried. The number one factor in predicting whether a woman will choose abortion is not her access to a government program, but whether she has a husband to share the responsibility of raising the child with. No government program is ever going to make up for an absent father.

Comment below how you think we can get more fathers positively involved in life decisions, and to be present in their children’s lives for the long term.

Number 3.

It’s not true that pro-lifers are just pro-birth. Plain and simple. Pro-lifers care about, and are involved in all kinds of charitable causes, humanitarian efforts and government programs that support life before and after birth.

For example: the organization I founded, Stanton Healthcare, supports one of the largest networks of life-affirming medical clinics and pregnancy care centers in North America, with over 30,000 volunteers providing the women who walk through our doors with more than $62 million in donated services and compassionate women’s healthcare (at no charge) last year. This includes ultrasounds, prenatal care, diapers, baby clothes and toys, new carseats, formula, wellness care, life coaching, the works. These are services for the duration of the pregnancy and even after the baby is born. On the whole, the pro-life movement provides over $270 million dollars worth of support through exceptional life-affirming care and quality medical services to women and families every year.

So when people say pro-lifers are just pro-birth, I say “I’m not just pro-birth. I support and care about all kinds of important issues. But as a pro-lifer, I’m focused on the preborn because they are the only group of people whose lives are not protected by our government. And if our nation cannot protect and guarantee the right to life of every person then no freedom or right we enjoy as Americans is secure.”