Just as the winter and summer solstice are polar opposites six months apart, so also the Day of Silence in support of gays and lesbians always happens six months prior to today’s Pro-Life Day of Silent Solidarity in support of fetuses who might someday become babies. I cannot imagine that the symbolically oppositional timing could possibly be a coincidence.
In my moderately-sized hometown of Edmond, Oklahoma, there will be at least a few students silently protesting the ongoing legality of abortion at Sequoyah Middle School, Edmond North High School, and the University of Central Oklahoma.
We can safely assume that the young women in these schools are at significantly reduced risk of unplanned pregnancy (relative to the U.S. population as a whole) because they are living in a fairly affluent community with ample access to family planning services and contraception. We can also safely assume that the anti-abortion protesters in these schools aren’t particularly interested in a pragmatic approach to reducing the incidence rates of pregnancies and abortion among those more at risk , but as Skeptics and Humanists, we should be.
Is there a demonstrably effective approach that would reduce the incidence rates of unplanned pregnancy and abortion? Of course there is: providing contraception to women most at risk. Even relatively modest proposals for Medicaid expansion of contraceptive coverage would most like result in preventing hundreds of thousands of abortions annually, even while saving the federal government billions of dollars in pregnancy-related care.
Do the people protesting today favor such an expansion of government-funded contraceptive services? Not as far as I can tell. Whenever I dig deep into the literature of any given anti-abortion group, I almost always find a hard-core of faith-based anti-contraception doctrine. Why is that? Ultimately, it is because Christian patriarchy (which admits of all sorts of degrees and variations) requires that a woman submit her body and her reproductive capacities to her husband, so that she may be “saved through childbearing” in the words of St. Paul. More proximately, it is because of the outsized role that Catholic churches have had in the modern pro-life movement.
Once again we are faced with a choice between ancient dogma and modern science, between what is fervently believed and what actually works. If you see anyone deliberately silencing themselves today, please, do give them an earful about it.
