An in-depth look at the Republican hallucination of a “pro-life” platform

“The Republican Party must continue to uphold the principle that every human being, born and unborn, young and old, healthy and disabled, has a fundamental, individual right to life.” -Republican National Committee for Life

Even before the historic Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, in 1973, the National Republican Party Presidential Platform has consistently taken a so-called “pro-life” position. For example, its 2012 platform proclaims: “Faithful to the ‘self-evident’ truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.”

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The Republican Party might have an interest in bringing pregnancies to term in nearly all situations – even in instances of rape and incest and when the life of the mother is in jeopardy, and also regardless of the wishes of the people involved. But even a cursory investigation into the party’s stances and actions on the major issues of the day –proposed and in many cases acted upon by current Republican legislators and executives on the national, state, and local levels – gives us a picture of a party that is anything but “pro-life” for the living.

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In actuality, the GOP conducts itself as a Party that stands for life until birth; then one is left to fend for oneself.

The Republican Party grounds itself on the political philosophy that has come to be known as “neoliberalism,” which centers on a market-driven approach to economic and social policy.

Such tenets include reducing the size of the national government and ceding more control to state and local governments; severely reducing or ending governmental regulation over the private sector; privatization of governmental services, industries, and institutions including education, healthcare, social welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; permanent incorporation of across-the-board non-progressive marginal federal and state tax rates; and perhaps most importantly, unfettered market-driven (“free market”) economics.

Taken together, these precepts claim those who favor neoliberalist ideals will ensure the individual’s autonomy, liberty, and, of course, freedom. Neoliberalism disputes the notion of general responsibility for others and for a collective cooperative society, which many in the party label as “socialistic,” “communistic,” or “Marxist.”

Neoliberalism rewrites the old African proverb that “It takes a village to raise a child” to “It takes only the parents, composed of one man and one woman, to raise a child, and the more the better.”

Under its understanding of being “pro-life” in its policies and accumulated legislative actions, the GOP fights for the lives of the upper 10% of our population who control approximately 80-90% of the accumulated wealth and 85% of the stocks and bonds. It works to keep corporate and executive tax rates lower than the rates of the secretaries who work in these corporations.

The GOP adheres to its philosophy of an unrestricted “free” market system, even though it increases the size and magnitude of mega-global corporations that gobble up small and emerging entrepreneurs. 

Under its understanding of being “pro-life” in its policies and accumulated legislative actions, the GOP, time and time again, has attempted to rescind and reverse the historic Affordable Care Act, which would return an estimated 50 million people in our country to the ranks of the uninsured where their only option of healthcare is the hospital emergency room that the remainder of the population must pay for since the GOP adamantly refuses to provide a single-payer government healthcare system.

Instead, Republicans force us to accept the exorbitant profit-motivated insurance premium rates of private healthcare providers.

The GOP votes against raising government student assistance programs or easing the debt students have accumulated, even as college and university tuition increases, resulting in the exclusion of deserving students of middle- and working-class backgrounds from institutions of higher learning.

The GOP has consistently tried, and in many instances succeeded, in circumscribing the basic rights of citizens to participate in the electoral process following the conservative-controlled Supreme Court’s decision to strike down sections of the 1965 “Voting Rights Act.”

Under its understanding of being “pro-life” in its policies and accumulated legislative actions, the GOP has consistently cut governmental entitlement programs like the SNAP (food stamp) program, thereby eliminating the safety net support systems for our elders, our young people, people with disabilities, people who have suffered hard times, and others struggling to obtain life’s basic needs.

The GOP fights at every turn to pass legislation restricting immigration as well as social and educational services to young people.

It attacks the rights of women to control their bodies. Doctors and others are intimidated, and even shot and killed at family planning clinics. I suppose that since these women have already been born, the GOP has lost its concern for them.

The GOP attempts to deny basic human and civil rights to LGBTQ+ people, rights that are routinely accorded to heterosexual people on a daily basis, and it attempts to take control away from parents who support trans youth who wish (need) to access gender-affirming care, thereby placing these children at greater risk for psychological, emotional, and physical harm.

The party stands opposed to national policies that subsidize childcare services for working parents and it opposes paid parental leave.

Some Republican governors have taken “emergency powers” to prevent local mayors, public health experts, and other officials from taking their own “emergency powers” to mitigate a deadly transmissible viral pandemic. These governors sued mayors and local school districts to prevent them from instituting mask mandates as students were returning to classrooms. They attempted to subvert local governance.

The Republican Party, by pandering to its increasingly conservative Christian evangelical base, has essentially become its own religious cult, choosing death in the name of God over reasoned scientific advancements.

So when the Party argues it will fight for the rights guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment for embryos and fetuses to “equal protection under the law,” it is not interested in, or actually opposes, extending these rights to the living, including LGBTQ+ people, as evidenced by its staunch opposition to marriage equality and its push to pass the current plethora of so-called “Religious Freedom Restoration” acts, which grant people the right to discriminate on “religious” grounds.

Under its understanding of being “pro-life” in its policies and accumulated legislative actions, the GOP fights to abolish affirmative action programs branding these as nothing more than “reverse discrimination,” even though such programs have improved the lives of people of color and women by providing them with increased assess to educational and employment opportunities previously denied to them.

The GOP drives to privatize our national parks and loosen environmental and consumer protections of all kinds, and it advocates for mining, petroleum, natural gas, and lumber companies to exploit the land, while simultaneously working to continue to hand over enormous tax breaks and subsidies to these industries.

The GOP backs deregulation of environmental standards and the termination of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Protection Agency, even as residents of the U.S., who represent approximately 4.25% of the world’s population and contribute 14% of the world’s toxic pollution.

The GOP battles for school vouchers to funnel money into parochial institutions at the expense of public education, and it lobbies to reintroduce prayer into public schools. Essentially, the GOP has not merely attempted to blur the lines as much as they have worked to abolish the already tenuous separation of religion and government.

Under its understanding of being “pro-life” in its policies and accumulated legislative actions, the GOP opposes and works to abolish multicultural education and the teaching of the accurate historical facts of the United States age-appropriately throughout the grade levels, including the highly successful and productive Latina/o Studies programs in the state of Arizona, a program that increased graduation rates of students from less than 50% to 92% before primarily Republican politicians axed it.

The GOP self-righteously pushes for legislation, like that passed in Iowa, which mandates English as the “official” language, thereby threatening bilingual education and stigmatizing non-English language speakers.

The GOP works for people to own and use assault rifles and to carry concealed guns into bars, political rallies, and college campuses. It long ago placed itself in the pocket of the National Rifle Association, which claims in its literature that “GUNS SAVE LIVES” as it fights to dismantle governmental regulations on gun ownership and use.

I guess “guns don’t kill people,” but instead, guns held by people in a country that only barely gives lip service to gun control kill people.

In this regard, the GOP still claims a “pro-life” trademark when more often than not, Republican leaders favor the death penalty rather than life imprisonment as punishment for committing certain crimes.

I could go on in this way virtually forever.

The neoliberal battle cry of “liberty” and “freedom” through “personal responsibility” sounds wonderful on paper or on the campaign stump, but we have to ask ourselves as individuals and as a collective nation, what are the costs of this alleged “liberty” and “freedom”?

How “pro-life” is the GOP; or more accurately, for whose lives does the GOP actually fight?

While trumpeting (pun intended) the battle cry of “small government,” it hypocritically bases its agenda on taking away people’s rights already granted to them, as well as placing enormous barriers to the fulfillment of rights not yet secured.  

Do we as individuals and as a nation have any responsibility and obligation to protect and support people from falling off the ledge of circumstance to their harm or death because they simply cannot “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”?

Have you actually ever tried to pull yourself up by your bootstraps? If you have, you will know that by doing this, you literally fall on your face.

Can we begin, for example, to view healthcare not as a privilege for those who can afford it, but rather, see it as a human right? Can we begin to perceive the actual crack in this beautiful notion but unmet reality of meritocracy, and instead respond in common purpose and sense of community to help lift those who are in need of support?

In the end, the GOP’s “pro-life” rhetoric and its small and limited government philosophy stand in stark contradiction: Republicans want to get the government “off our backs” while imposing massive governmental restrictions at the expense of women’s reproductive freedoms, LGBTQ+ rights, the education of all students, among others.

So, for women, and also for LGBTQ+, middle class, working class, and poor people, people of color, non-documented residents and “dreamers,” people concerned with the health of our planet, people interested in living in a safer and less violent society and world, people who see healthcare as a right and not as a privilege for those who can afford it – how much real “freedom” and “liberty” do these people actually have in the Republican hallucination of “pro-life”?

So, as we reach the one-year mark of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that reversed Roe v. Wade and unraveled the legal right to abortion, we need to ask ourselves as a nation several critical questions, the primary one being: “How ‘Pro-Life’ really is the Republican Party?”