Why I'm Not Trying to Convert ProChoicers

I realize that saying this makes me sound like a heretic, but what I do with this blog is not intended to convert prochoicers to the prolife cause.

I can just hear the response: WTF?!?!

Hear me out.

The goal of this blog is to protect women:

• From unwanted abortions
• From abortion injuries
• From quackery and death

"Yes," says the prolifer. "That's why we want people to convert to prolife! Then they will work with us to totally end abortion!"

That's a lovely goal, but it doesn't help the roughly 3,300 women and girls walking into abortion facilities tomorrow. They are at risk right now. And it's those women and girls that this blog is here for.

So today, fellow prolifer, I'm not talking to you. I want to talk to procohoicers who hear stories about abortion injuries, and coerced abortions, and seedy abortion mills, and are horribly dismayed, but don't know what to do to address those problems without having to switch sides on an issue that they have strong convictions about.

I'm talking to prochoicers who wish that they could make abortion just go away.

Here's where I reassert: I don't want to convert you.

"Yeah, right," many of you are thinking.

But I am 100% truthful. I do not want to convert you from prochoice to prolife, for a very practical reason: If you convert, you become utterly powerless to address the problems.

If a prolifer tries to shut down a seedy abortion mill, she gets blown off. After all, she wants every abortion facility shut down. Her motives are automatically suspect. The assumption is that she'll say anything to get any abortion facility closed, so she must be lying or taking things out of context or blowing things out of proportion. If she gets other prolifers to join her, then it becomes seen as an evil conspiracy. The prochoice citizens join the abortion-rights establishment in circling the wagons and protecting the place from what they naturally view as an unwarranted attack.

If prochoicers, on the other hand, are the ones waving around medical board documents and copies of health department inspections, and are the ones getting injured or abused women to speak out, their motives aren't called into question. Their concerns are taken seriously. Yes, unless it turns out to be as hideous a place as Kermit Gosnell's "house of horrors," there will still be hardcore abortion-rights advocates that will defend the place, but a lot of the wind will be taken out of their sails if they know that they're being carefully watched by their own constituency.

This is why I don't want you, the prochoice citizen, to convert. If you become prolife, you become just another antichoice nutcase who is only saying those bad things because you want to end abortion. If you remain prochoice, you keep your credibility and your power to take action and to protect women against abuses, coercion, injury, and death -- which is why you identify as prochoice in the first place..