The United States pro-life movement (also known as the United States anti-abortion movement or the United States right-to-life movement) is a social and political movement in the United States opposing on moral or sectarian grounds elective abortion and usually supporting its legal prohibition or restriction.”
So begins the Wikipedia article on “United States pro-life movement.” Nonetheless, as it did on mercury emissions from power plants, the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) now wants to redefine climate change as a “pro-life” issue, obscuring the meaning of “pro-life,” redefining “life” as “perceived quality of life,” and dividing and weakening the pro-life movement. Real pro-life leaders are not pleased.
Marilyn Musgrave, Vice President for Government Affairs of the Susan B Anthony List, said two years ago about the misrepresentation of mercury emissions as a pro-life issue, “As a pro-life leader I am amazed that some in the far left environmentalist movement would try to hijack the term ‘pro-life’ and use it to further their agenda. It is my life’s call to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves and work to end abortion in this country. The term pro-life has profound meaning and should not be used deceitfully in this way.”
Musgrave’s words are equally applicable to the new attempt to portray global warming as a pro-life issue.
As pro-life leaders pointed out in response to EEN’s mercury “pro-life” campaign, the difference between environmental risks (even if one accepts EEN’s gross exaggerations regarding mercury emissions before, and about climate change now) and abortion are stark and ethically compelling. Providers of abortion intend to kill an infant every time they perform an abortion.
The key words are “intend” and “kill.”
Providers of electricity do not intend to kill anyone, and actual risks to human beings from electricity generation—whether from mercury emissions or from global warming—tend to fall far short of death.
In mercury’s case, actual risks, to an essentially non-existent population (theoretically, infants in the wombs of women who consume 105 pounds of self-caught fish per year from the 1% most-polluted waters of America or 225 pounds of self-caught fish per year from the 10% most-polluted waters—the federal Environmental Protection Agency has not been able to identify any such women), amount to a reduction in IQ so slight that only trained specialists using targeted testing can detect it, that disappears in most by age 2 and almost all by age 7, and that, in those in whom it persists, is about ½ IQ point, a difference common in identical twins raised in the same household.
As for global warming, the reduced rates of disease and premature death from the clean energy and economic development made possible by electricity generation outweigh whatever theoretical increased rates might come from global warming driven by it.
In their official statement condemning EEN’s mercury “pro-life” campaign, pro-life leaders said, “The term pro-life originated historically in the struggle to end abortion on demand and continues to be used in public discourse overwhelmingly in that sense. To ignore that is at best sloppy communication and at worst intentional deception. The life in pro-life denotes not quality of life but life itself. The term denotes opposition to a procedure that intentionally results in dead babies.”
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