Pro-lifers don’t kill people for a very good reason. They don’t kill people because they’re pro-life. This is also the reason why pro-lifers oppose war and the death penalty. This should be obvious, and it’s kind of sad that it isn’t.
Now, for the opponents of abortion other than the pro-lifers (of which there are admittedly a great deal), I don’t know the answer, but it would surely be tied into the reason (whatever it is in each case) why they are opposed to abortion.
I don’t think utilitarians of the “kill X to save Y” stripe make for very strong pro-lifers.
Also, very few self-described pro-lifers are really that definite or that extreme about it.
I expect pro-lifers are more generally one of the following:
The Paul Hill and Scott Roeder types are unusual.
(And honestly, serious and reflective utilitarians are pretty much by definition incapable of being consistently anti-abortion, because they believe in situation, consequence, and weighing the relative value of imperfect alternatives. A smart utilitarian doesn’t kill an abortion provider, because that abortion provider is needed to save women with non-viable pregnancies. And the more successful pro-life rhetoric is in a society, the higher the proportion of non-viable pregnancies in that physician’s work.)
What, you don’t consider harassing women who are performing a legal act “extreme”? If pro-lifers don’t like abortion, they can work to make it illegal. But leave the women and the clinics alone.
I’ve talked to many of these people, and you cannot believe how they think. One protestor actually told me “Things were better in the past, when white men controlled everything.”
When polls say that a high percentage of Americans self-identify as “pro-life,” remember that most of those have no interest in harassing a woman going to get an abortion. They object to it morally, or their mama does, or something, but they’re not camping out in front of Planned Parenthood to terrorize people.
The activists are a minority. The “justifiable homicide” crowd are a minority. The activists who accept the idea of justifiable homicide are an intersection of minorities, and the ones with the cold-blooded commitment to do it themselves and go to prison are a pretty small minority. Enough to terrorize doctors out of specializing in abortions, but not really close to the 100 million or whatever number call themselves “pro-life.”
I made a mistake earlier and left something out.
We know that “pro-life” is branding for “anti-abortion.” What’s important to understand is that the “pro-life”/“anti-abortion” lobby is not monolithic. Parts of it, the most determinedly perverse parts of it, are actually a continuation of the old “anti-birth-control” tendency.
Judie Brown’s American Life League, for example, is opposed to sex education and to all forms of birth control (except, I think, the rhythm method). In their literature, all forms of contraception, all artificial forms of birth control whether or not a fetus exists yet, are “abortion.” This makes etymological sense. You are aborting the process of procreation. The joke version of this is the man who thinks life begins when he unzips his trousers. What this has to do with sex education I’m less clear on, except that they’re wowsers.
Another element would be anti-medicine movements, like the Church of Christ Scientist. Saying you’re against all medical care is not politically acceptable, but being against reproductive medical care apparently is. So they hang out with the wowsers, and lobby to sabotage prenatal care and contraception.
I don’t know a lot about the Quiverfull movement, but as radical bonehead natalists, they’re sort of adjacent to this. They seem to oppose ALL forms of contraception for themselves. I don’t think they try to force it on others, but I don’t know. Their idea of family planning is, “Let God work in you his plan for your family.” I don’t know how these people manage economically. Anyway, I could see some anti-abortion leaders coming from more or less the same confused stew of piety and superstition and being super anti-family planning.
And some anti-abortion types (actually these are an implicit subset of all of the above) are basically self-absorbed and/or misogynistic men, who want women to bear children for them, never mind the women’s opinions. So, anti-contraception and anti-abortion.
“Anti-abortion” is what they pretend they are. But it’s so much more than that!
If that was at me, I said, “that extreme.” Someone like Scott Roeder, who killed George Tiller, would appear to be *the *extreme. George Tiller was a physician who specialized in ending doomed, bad-outcome, must-abort, “no really there is no hope remove the dead fetus or you die too,” pregnancies.
So if there’s an extreme, Roeder would appear to be it. Most “extremists” are not that extreme.
It should also be mentioned that American society is divided into three parts, not two, of roughly equal size: About a third each believe that abortion should be permitted under no circumstances, under all circumstances, or under some circumstances but not others (precisely which circumstances varies among this last group). Depending on how you slice things, this means that either of the “two sides” can claim a sizable majority: “Most Americans support allowing (at least some) abortions!”, or “Most Americans support prohibiting (at least some) abortions!”.
To answer the OP, it’s because the death of something unborn doesn’t *feel *the same as the death of something born.
Imagine a video of someone killing a bald eagle. Then imagine a video of someone destroying a bald eagle egg (containing a live embryo.) Which video is more likely to elicit a visceral, angry, outraged gut response?
I’m mostly in group 2) but with a dash of simple moral cowardice, and also utilitarian concerns (killing abortion doctors, at least for now, wouldn’t make the situation any better in concrete terms, and it would simply invite more repression). I have no doubt that starting at conception, you have a person who deserves the same right to life as you or me, and that most abortions constitute killing a person with no very good reason. That being said, there are a small minority of abortions which might be justified (on grounds of serious threats to the mother’s health, etc.), and it can be fairly subtle differentiating which abortions are justified from which ones aren’t. That’s why we need the state, lawmakers, judges, courts, etc. to make these decisions (including, ‘which abortions count as murder, and which ones count as self-defence’), not private individuals with guns. This is also the reason I want penalties for abortion, when it’s eventually banned, to be less severe than murder.
The real reason?
Because it would be counter productive to their goals. In fact, it would put an end to them, in any way shape or form, ever being taken seriously. They would have lowered themselves to being murderers too, losing any (imaginary) moral high ground they may have felt entitled to. It’s kinda hard to hold up your Holy book as the justification when the book specifies “Thou shalt not kill”.
How is all of this anything but self evident?
There are plenty of more-militant tactics sincere “prolifers” could use, without getting into any violence. But direct action against clinics is relatively rare, and determined bodily blockades virtually unheard of. It seems clear that the overwhelming majority of “prolifers” are simply unwilling to risk imprisonment and fines (akin to what civil rights demonstrators routinely endured) to stand against what they claim to see as a holocaust.
This is a silly argument because most Christians think that there are exceptions to ‘thou shalt not kill’, i.e. Some instances of war, Revolution, capital punishment etc… There needs to be an explanation of why none of those exceptions would apply to killing abortionists. I think foolsguinea and I gave some answers above.
Be that as it may, I believe, MOST Christians would find the killing of doctors abhorrent, and would distance themselves from such actions. They would swiftly be marginalized as the violent extremists they are, in my opinion.
So…counter productive to their objectives!
Protests are not extreme for any reasonable value of the word “extreme”.
You are correct - I don’t believe that this is how they think.
Regards,
Shodan