The pro-life movement is a false opposition. This sounds like a mean-spirited statement to make. Who can blame the little old ladies from church for wanting to end the mass-murder of children in abortion mills around the country? Nevertheless, the truth stands on its own; the pro-life movement works by taking those dissatisfied with the state of contemporary politics and funneling them into an area where they can do little or no harm. More importantly, however, the pro-life leadership actively collaborates with the death culture of the Left and participation in the pro-life movement aids and abets the larger death-worshiping culture of modernity. Liberalism, like its two cousin ideologies and all universalist movements, fundamentally rests on a culture which requires the murder of all undesirables. The unborn are merely canaries in the coalmine for the ideological love of death.

The obvious argument, albeit the lesser one, is that the leadership of the pro-life movement do not actually believe in their own cause or arguments. The leadership is either intentionally perfidious, more concerned with optics than outcomes, or else simply ignorant. It is possible that all three of these apply to some degree or another to the major leaders of the pro-life movement.

First, what kind of action is abortion? The liberal position is that it is a surgery, a kind of health care, that removes an unwanted lump of cells from the woman’s uterus. The purported position of the pro-life movement is that it is a murder of a living human being. The liberal position is internally consistent. If a human being is defined by their consciousness, then a being incapable of consciousness cannot be fully human. Remember this concept at the end of this essay. Therefore, it is impossible for abortion to be murder, and it is acceptable for a woman to pursue an abortion.

The pro-life position, on the other hand, fails the test of internal consistency. It argues that human life begins at conception, and that abortion therefore is the termination of a human life, i.e. murder. At this point, however, the pro-life position falls to pieces. If an abortion is the murder of a child, who is the murderer? Pro-life leaders have been explicit that they do not consider women who pursue abortion to be murderers. It is the mother whose action instigates the chain of events which lead to an abortion, and her agency which primarily wills the abortion. The rise of informed consent laws merely highlights that the act of abortion is not due to the will of the doctor or clinic but the mother who freely chooses abortion after clearing the high hurdle of understanding the procedure and all alternative options. This makes her ethically responsible for the action, thus logically she must be a murderer if abortion is murder. If she is not a murderer, abortion must not be murder.

The particulars of this argument are not important to this essay, only the inconsistent actions of leaders in the pro-life movement. Either they don’t actually believe that abortion is murder, making them perfidious, they care more about publicity than their cause, making them fools, or they are ignorant individuals who cannot think through a basic logical syllogism. Certainly, there are careerists and idiots in leadership throughout the world, but one more piece of evidence leads to the conclusion that the leadership of the pro-life movement are actively sabotaging their own movement.

“X is a Pro-Life issue, too” has become more and more common in the pro-life movement, from capital punishment to open borders. The same people who don’t really believe that abortion is murder and refuse to condemn women who obtain abortions are extraordinarily quick to condemn judges and ICE officers as killers and sinners. Putting aside the entire absurd notion that a rejected visa application is the equivalent of death, this incongruity in their behavior suggests that their actual goals are not related to the purported goals of the pro-life movement. At the local level, parishioners are being asked to make second donations to save the lives of children. At the diocese level, this money is being used to pursue the politics of left-wing bishops. There is little other than active perfidy which can explain this course of events. The pro-life movement is a giant gaslighting campaign to divert discontent against the modern system and funnel resources toward the very thing they oppose: leftist politics.

This argument is the lesser argument, however, because it only implicates the leadership. One could respond that the solution to this problem is to replace the leaders with true believers who will pursue the goals of the pro-life movement. This solution, however, illustrates the greater argument, that the pro-life movement is necessarily flawed due to the fact that Roe v. Wade is the logical and necessary consequence of predicating social membership on the concept of consent. So long as the pro-life movement embraces liberal politics, they are naturally and inevitably pro-abortion.

This is not a unique argument. Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame has recently discussed the liberal roots of abortion in the notion of government by consent. Well-known Catholic philosopher Robert George at Princeton has also noted that notions of humanity based on concepts like consciousness and consent naturally lead to a state where individuals who lack those capabilities are denied their basic humanity. George’s work on the mind-body dichotomy reflect the innate connection between liberal notions of consciousness and the liberal movement to deny the human dignity of the unborn, the sick, and the elderly.

In this way, liberalism is no different from its other universalist ideological siblings, communism and fascism. In invoking a world-immanent universal community, they must resort to paradigms which are inherently limited and constricting, thus incomplete. When people appear who cannot fit the paradigm of the world-community, the very existence of these people demonstrate the lie at the center of the ideological construct. While the threat may not be immediate, eventually all of these ideological systems will find it necessary to remove these inconvenient people. Unfortunately, as universalist creeds, simply deporting them is not sufficient. The universal world-community has no border over which deportation is possible, thus make mass-murder the logically inevitable and ultimate conclusion of the ideological regime.

The Soviets made industrial working-class identity the basis of the world-community of humanity, thus when a body of individuals existed who could not or did not fit that abstract, ideological pattern, their existence stood as a rebuttal to the ideological attachments of the regime. Likewise, in Maoist China, Peasant Communism asserted the mode of the peasant as the universal model and mode of human life, leading to the annihilation of anyone who could not fit the model. Liberalism’s only difference is that its model is psychological rather than economic. By defining humanity and membership in the community of the state in terms of “consent,” “reason,” and “consciousness,” it serves to unperson all those who are incapable of giving said consent or who fail the ideological test of rationality.

This illustrates the importance which the Left attaches to psychologically diagnosing their opponents. If membership in the universal community is a factor of consenting to an ideological proposition, then the insane do not deserve the full rights of membership due to their incapacity to consent. Thus, a person who is “homophobic,” “xenophobic,” or possesses any of a litany of psychologized ideological deviations are not fully human, as defined by having a consciousness capable of giving consent to the liberal project, and can be excluded from the body politic. This can be seen clearly in works like John Rawls’s Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness Revisited. In his discussion of the distinction between reasonableness and rationality, he is quite clear that a person who rejects his reasonable proposals must necessarily be irrational. Irrational people cannot give consent, and therefore cannot be members either of society or humanity itself. If we define humanity as the community of conscious beings capable of rational consent, then the person defined as irrational must be fundamentally sub-human at some level, and therefore their interests, goals, and ideas need not be acknowledged as legitimate.

Thus, it is no great leap to deny rights of membership in society to those who are not, by the liberal definition, members of society. As they are incapable of consent (as evidenced by the fact that they don’t consent to the “reasonable” positions of the Left), they have no voice in their treatment, any more than any other non-conscious or non-rational creature. These are the inconvenient people of the liberal regime, who like the Soviet kulaks and Maoist intellectual disprove the essential proposition of the regime. The removal of these people from public life, even from employment and housing, is no different than the euthanasia of the incurably ill. Neither the coma patient nor the ideological nonconformist are capable of rational thought according to the ideological perspective of the Left, and therefore are somewhat less than human. It might even be thought of as a kind of mercy. Just as the terminal cancer patient is given mercy in euthanasia, the ideological dissenter is given a mercykilling in the form of opioids, cheap entertainment, and death by heart disease or diabetes. In the liberal perspective, this isn’t really a form of murder. Just consider it post-birth abortion.

A life-affirming culture is incompatible with an intra-mundane universal community. By attempting to define humanity outside of a divine or transcendent foundation, the inherent contradiction of the concepts of “universal” and “community” emerge. Community is defined as much by those who are excluded as by those who are included; universal community in this world is a circle with no edge, a contradiction in terms. It is only by affirming the nature of humanity as an infinitely plural series of exclusive and occasionally overlapping communities that a concept like humanity can exist without the necessity of mass-murder. When community is plural, not universal, everyone has a place. That place might be on the other side of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers, but it is a place nonetheless. For all the suffering of the Pakistan-India division, the alternative was far worse: a full, genocidal Indian civil war. A place for every person is the only ideological point which embeds the abhorrence of mass-murder in its core. Anything else is objectively pro-death.