Pro-Lifers, Your Whataboutism Is Infuriating

The United States government, in an effort to deter illegal immigration at the border, has separated over 2,000 migrant children from their families in the past 6 weeks. Two. Thousand. Children.

This is not a partisan issue. It’s not a grey issue. We cannot agree to disagree on this one. This is evil.

And yet, as they do with every social justice and humanitarian issue, pro-lifers shout, but what about the millions of babies aborted every year?

Let me be clear. If you consider abortion an act of violence but not an infant being ripped from his mother’s arms at the border, you are not pro-life. Your response to the cries of injustice about the systematic torture of children is actually the flawed logic of whataboutism. You are attempting to deflect from the issue, and therefore excuse yourself from responsibility to act on behalf of those children. Again, you are not pro-life.

Some of you could not bring yourself to vote for the most qualified presidential candidate because she believes in a woman’s right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy. And yet, you are digging in your heels in support of the “pro-life” president, even though he is using children’s lives as bargaining chips in one of his “deals.” It’s gross.

Every one of those children taken from their parents’ arms and currently living in modern day concentration camps was once a fetus. And every one of their mothers did exactly what you claim to value over all else: they chose life for their child.

Of course, life outside the womb is often less convenient to love, value, and cherish. But Life is inconvenient. It’s often messy, costly, and dangerous. Life doesn’t always speak our language, follow our religion, or even obey our laws. Life is sometimes desperate, and desperately needs compassion and empathy.

You can’t have it both ways. Words matter and actions matter. You can’t can’t scream, “It’s a Child, Not a Choice!” and in the same breath, use dehumanizing terms like “Illegals” when referring to fellow human beings. If you are truly pro-life, you don’t get to pick and choose which lives to value.

A mother breastfeeding her infant is giving her life. How is it pro-life to take that baby away from her? Who is feeding that baby tonight, holding her, keeping her warm? Who is comforting that mother, her breasts likely engorged with milk with no baby to feed?

A family fleeing violence and making a treacherous journey to give their children some glimmer of hope of a better situation in America is choosing life. How is it pro-life to shrug and dismiss them saying, how do we even know that they are really a family?

If you are like the U.S. Attorney General, and use Scripture to justify the atrocities happening at the border, you believe that God has ordained the laws of the land. Then, by this same logic, you really should shut the fuck up about abortion, because the law says abortion is legal.

You are passionate about the abortion issue — fine. Passion is admirable. But stop with the whataboutism. It’s not helping your cause and it’s actually making you less credible. The fact that women are legally allowed to have abortions in this country doesn’t then mean that our government has the right to tear families apart. If you want to protest an abortion clinic, you should be just as willing to protest a building or camp holding children as prisoners.

If you believe a fetus has a right to life, but an actual child at the border doesn’t have a right to stay with his family, you are not pro-life — you are pro-birth. There are over 2,000 children whose mothers chose life for them, only to be separated by a cruel administration that is pro-life in name only. Stop deflecting this real humanitarian crisis, and prove that you do indeed value life.