If they really believed this

Like the majority of Americans, I do not believe that abortions are analogous to murder. The simple fact that this is a majority opinion does not inherently make it the correct opinion. But I do know that if I believed that abortion was murder, and therefore tens of millions of murders had been conducted with the tacit blessing of a major American political party and many millions of its members and supporters, I would not be able to sleep at night. I would not be able to function in society. The amount of therapy I would need just to make sense of the world in which I live would keep me from being able to do anything else.

Maybe I am an extreme case of internalized guilt—I can’t bring myself to eat meat because of an outsized level of guilt regarding living things, and I feel legitimately upset any time I am forced to kill even a tiny insect. And I of course value human lives considerably more than (other) animal lives. But it sure seems like most people value human life enough that what could reasonably be termed a holocaust would paralyze a material number of the tens of millions of Americans who would deem abortion to be murder.

And yet that didn’t seem to happen, and when you consider the central thesis of the anti-abortion movement—that hundreds of millions of Americans are complicit in the murder of innocent babies—it is incredible that the self-stylized “pro-life” movement is not considerably more militant than it is. Why would a true believer in the cause ever seek the approval, or any level of companionship, with a so-called baby killer? If your pro-choice relatives won’t speak to you because you oppose murder, aren’t they just saving you having to sever ties yourself?

At the very least, why would an anti-abortion person not feel a strong, undying urge to sway the people they know and otherwise care about to believe in the immorality of abortion? Sure, the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade was not centered around changing hearts or minds and it was ultimately successful in subverting the will of the American people, but they still live in a country where, in their eyes, murder is popular. They live in a country where abortion is still going to be legal in large swaths of the country and where there is a widespread effort to fund abortions in states where they would remain legal.

Again, I don’t believe that abortion is murder. But those who do believe it is and respond with seething hatred are not the ones who confound me—it’s those who believe that abortion is murder and compartmentalize it, who regard the pro-choice as misguided in the same way they might view those with differing views on taxation—people with whom they agree to disagree. That is impossible for me to comprehend. And it’s why I don’t believe them.

If the anti-abortion were serious, how could they not feel invested in making the world acutely aware that what is happening is a moral abomination? How could they not participate in measures that, whether impacting its legality or not, would decrease demand for abortion, such as increasing availability of pre-fertilization birth control, promoting forms of sex education that demonstrably decrease unwanted pregnancies (i.e. “not abstinence-only”), and establishing a social safety net that would make having a child seem like something other than financially ruinous? Why would opposition to abortion have a strong inverse correlation to opposition to the death penalty, or to war, or to a welfare state robust enough to prevent homelessness or starvation, or to universal health care?

The scientific argument for the abortion of a non-viable pregnancy being murder is effectively non-existent—the aborted pregnancy is a wholly dependent extension of the mother. The religious argument that it is murder is not especially robust, either—the direct Biblical condemnation of abortion is, at most, open to an interpretation of passages that is largely about confirming prior instincts (the Biblical argument against eating shellfish or men not growing a beard is considerably more overt), and Judaism specifically requires abortion in certain cases, though for freedom of religion to apply exclusively to a very specific interpretation of Christianity is hardly new.

Even if I do not agree with it, I understand, if you consider abortion to be murder, how one cannot accept a simple difference of opinion. The same cannot be said of opposition to same-sex marriage, which impacts nobody outside of the marriage itself, or opposition to contraception, a thing which has stopped millions of abortions from happening, both of which Clarence Thomas has openly stated could be reconsidered in the wake of the Roe v. Wade overturning (Thomas famously did not reference the court’s Loving v. Virginia ruling that legalized interracial marriage, another harmlessly legal thing which Thomas, an active participant in an interracial marriage, apparently would not reconsider). The Roe v. Wade precedent is not being used in a legal fight against capital punishment; it is being used in a legal fight against pet cultural grievances of social conservatives to enforce that their concept of monoculture is preserved as a legally binding requirement.

The prospect of a country, and more broadly a world, where murder is shrugged off as either a secondary concern or an outright net positive, would terrify me, if this was what I believed was happening. I would devote every waking moment to comprehending the callousness and trying to change minds about it. I can’t even imagine the pain that this would cause me internally, or how I would be able to live in such an evil world. It is so inconceivable to me that I deem it truly and literally unbelievable.