"Pro-Life" = Pro-Black-Market-Abortion

The New York Times Magazine has another great article exposing the true agenda of the so-called "pro-life" movement. In last Sunday's edition, Russell Shorto reported that the social conservatives aren't content merely to ban abortion. Now they're going after contraception. Mr. Shorto quotes Judie Brown of the so-called American "Life" League:

"We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. "The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception."

(entire article here)

We need to stop calling these people "pro-life" or "anti-abortion." Those descriptions are lies. Reducing the availability of contraception would result in far more abortions than we have now. If these authoritarians were really anti-abortion, they would seek to emulate The Netherlands, where the abortion rate is less than half the abortion rate of the United States. From Mr. Shorto's article:

The Netherlands, where the teen pregnancy rate also ranks among the lowest in the world, has long been of interest to sex educators in the U.S. for the frankness of its approach. The national sex education course, called Long Live Love, begins at age 13. One of its hallmarks has been dubbed "Double Dutch" encouraging the use of both condoms and birth control pills. "It's proven successful," says Margo Mulder of STI AIDS Netherlands, the Dutch health education center. "It shows that when you discuss contraception and protection with students, they actually are careful. And I know that some people in the U.S. say that when you promote contraception, you're also promoting sex, but we've found that when you educate people, they don't have sex earlier. They think about it. So you're not promoting sex, you're helping them to be rational about doing it."

(entire article here, link via Pandagon)