Issues

The First Issue: What Does It Mean to be Pro-Life?

There are many people that say if you are pro-life, it means you only care about a child in the womb, but that you don’t care about the baby anymore after it is born. One of the big comments that we hear when witnessing outside of an abortion facility trying to change the minds of the women going in is “Are you going to feed and take care of it once it is born?….because I certainly can’t!”

If your view of life is limited in scope like that described above, then you are not “pro-life”, you are just “anti-abortion.” So what does it really mean to be pro-life?

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution states:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

To summarize, the preamble tells us that we are to take care of the well being of ourselves and everyone else, or as we sometimes say from the womb to the tomb. That means:

• YES! We believe in taking care of the poor, the sick, the elderly, the homeless and more.
• YES! We do care about the jobs and the economic outlook.
• YES! We do care about the quality of education in our schools.
• YES! We do care about women and women’s rights.
• YES! We do care about all social justice issues and their impact on life.
• We believe that we must defend and protect the sanctity and dignity of all human life during ALL stages of their lives.

This being said, as Right to Life of Northeast Ohio (as well as many other “pro-life” groups) we focus our expertise and efforts on core issues concerned with morality and the right to life. There are hundreds of other social justice organizations (and which we network with) that focus and specialize on issues concerned with the quality of life. At times we overlap in our mission and goals, but we each have our own area of focus.

For Right to Life of Northeast Ohio, this means that we will continue in our cause to protect innocent human life from conception through natural death. We condemn abortion, infanticide and all threats to the unborn, including those conceived of rape or incest, or those with any fetal anomoly. We also condemn euthanasia and assisted suicide. We believe a woman has the right to choose what she wants to do with her own body, but once she carries a new life in her womb, that is a whole separate body that should not be allowed to be terminated through abortion.