Pro-Life Liberals

Mainstream liberalism has popularized the idea that the supposed right to kill babies before they exit the womb is a vital or basic part of feminism, which is in turn associated with liberalism even though feminism, that misunderstood idea that is nothing but gender egalitarianism, is philosophically correct and liberalism is erroneous.  This is such a popular part of how modern liberals present their ideologies that pro-choice stances are regarded by both many conservatives and many liberals as an inherent part of liberal philosophy.  Those who acknowledge nuance are capable of discovering something that defies common expectations, highlights the fleeting embers of rationality in some liberal ideas, and exposes the hypocrisy of popular liberals all at once.  The basic concept of pro-life ideology is actually compatible with core liberalism.

Abortion and liberalism are so closely associated that it might genuinely surprise some people that, irrespective of the philosophical flaws of liberalism, a person could be a liberal and sincerely, consistently pro-life.  There are indeed some who openly identify as pro-life liberals, seeing that trivializing the unborn, which are just humans at a different stage of development than those outside of the womb, is contrary to the goal of affirming whatever human rights exist, as they would also be rights of the unborn.  Killing a human of any size or in any location for the sake of convenience is mere selfishness.  While there is one case where killing an unborn child is necessarily permissible even on Biblical ethics--a mother is not obligated to sacrifice her life for her child if a pregnancy was to genuinely threaten her life--abortion outside of this very limited context is objectively no different from murder except that it targets humans in the womb.

Being a liberal does not mean a person denies or has not realized these things.  It might be more unlikely that a liberal will be pro-life, just as it is more unlikely that a conservative will be a gender egalitarian, but it is not impossible.  A liberal who cares more about remaining consistent with certain ideological components of liberalism, such as the professed universality of human rights (this does not mean that liberal philosophy identifies human rights correctly, only that it is at least aimed at honoring them), could easily end up pro-life.  They would just have to avoid the liberal tendency of moving away from the status quo simply for the sake of pursuing imagined progress when not all ideas that have been historically popular are false.  A pro-life liberal would also understand that there is not only no inconsistency between pro-life philosophy and gender egalitarianism, but that feminism/egalitarianism, in rejecting hypocrisies and discrimination against men and women, elevates all people, including the unborn.

For all the stupidity of liberalism, at least liberalism is meant to affirm human rights better than the likewise fallacious tenets of conservatism do.  This means that it, in some ways, more naturally lends itself to pro-life ideas than conservatism does!  Liberalism as a whole is nothing but conscience-based emotionalism and a set of arbitrary goals rooted in personal preference or cultural appeal, just like conservatism (though conservatism is oriented around tradition), but there are some aspects of it that are rationalistically valid.  If there are human rights, then all humans have them, as liberalism insists; that the unborn are humans would mean they deserve whatever treatment people naturally deserve.  It is not difficult to realize how this core of liberalism and pro-life philosophy overlap to some extent.  Liberalism in its current dominant form excludes pro-life ideas, yet this is only because other sides of liberalism are ignored by the many vocal liberals.