No, the Republican Party Is Not “Pro Life.”

Not Even Remotely.

Elsewhere, I’ve written about how the complete set of Republican policies gives us two to three times as many abortions as the complete set of Democratic policies.

This means that Republican politicians are responsible for giving us an additional, completely unnecessary 300,000 to 700,000 abortions in America every year.

It means that when it comes to actually “getting rid of” abortion — the very thing that “pro-life” people are supposed to be “pro-life” about — it’s the Democratic Party, not the Republican one, that’s genuinely “pro-life.”

It also means — and this has to be the single greatest irony in all of American politics — that by constantly pushing us to elect Republican politicians for the past 45 years, the “pro-life movement” has actually pushed America’s abortion rate upward.

And of course, the failed strategy of simply making abortion illegal itself isn’t pro-life at all in regard to women themselves. Because it has all kinds of horrific side effects.

These include telling a raped 11 year old girl we’re going to force her to carry and bear a child whose sperm donor was her father or brother — when her body isn’t even mature enough to safely do so.

They include unnecessary deaths of women, as happened with Savita Halappanavar over in Ireland, when her doctors refused to give her a medically necessary abortion even though she was in the midst of a miscarriage, and there was no chance at all the developing child would survive.

Because the politicians had made it illegal.

These side effects include women being forced to stay with abusive partners or live in poverty, because they can’t afford a child.

They include forcing severely deformed fetuses who never had a chance to survive to develop until they can feel pain, and go through the suffering of birth and a slow death, when it would’ve been far more merciful for them never to develop and be born.

And in these instances, we have taken away from women who desperately want and love their developing child the ability to decide what is right and most merciful for that child.

So when you add the side-effect suffering that banning abortion inflicts on to the doubling or tripling in the number of abortions that Republican policies cause, Republicans aren’t even remotely pro-life on abortion itself.

But it’s not just abortion. It’s every other significant issue as well, all across the board.

Let’s take a look.

Republicans Are Anti-Life When It Comes to Life-Saving Health Care.

We often hear that the lives of the “unborn” are sacred.

Well, what about the lives of born people? Aren’t the lives of born people sacred, as well? Or do human lives stop being sacred as soon as they exit the womb?

Since 1945 (under Harry Truman), Democrats have tried again and again to reform our health care system to provide life-saving health coverage for every American.

That’s almost eighty years that Democrats have been trying to do this.

And health care for all of us is NOT some radical idea.

In fact, out of the 38 countries in the “OECD” (which is essentially the world’s developed-countries club), the United States of America and Mexico are the only ones that don’t provide health care for all of their citizens.

And Mexico — one of the poorest countries in the OECD — is moving steadily in that direction.

But Turkey? Slovakia? Chile? All of them already have universal health coverage.

It’s not just about coverage, though. It’s also about cost.

Here in the US, we pay roughly twice as much for our health care as the citizens of any other country on earth — and we’re not getting anywhere near twice the results.

So why don’t we have life-saving health care for all American citizens? And why do so many of us who do have health coverage pay through the nose?

It’s almost entirely because of the so-called “pro-life” Republican Party.

At the national level, Republicans fought tooth and nail to block the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) from becoming law.

The Affordable Care Act, which brought health coverage to at least 20 million Americans who previously could not afford health insurance.

Once “Obamacare” passed, Republican politicians tried again and again— especially under Trump — to repeal the law without having anything at all to replace it with.

As an aside, I would like to pause a moment and remember with gratitude the late Republican Senator John McCain, who courageously cast the famous, dramatic “thumbs down” vote on the floor of the US Senate in 2017 that blocked Trump’s attempted repeal — and along with him, Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who bucked their party to end the attempted destruction of the Affordable Care Act.

But every one of the remaining 49 Republicans in the US Senate voted in favor of that destruction.

These people voted to strip life-saving health care from 20 million Americans. Twenty million American men, women, and children.

That’s not pro life.

At the state level, it’s the same. Here in Missouri, Republicans repeatedly blocked Medicaid expansion that would provide (and that eventually has provided) health coverage to about 300,000 of our citizens.

This is 1 out of every 20 people in the state.

And they did so even though expanding Medicaid meant the federal government would provide more than $2 billion a year in federal money, and cover 90% of the bill.

This meant that for about $40 per resident per year, 1 out of every 20 Missourians — who didn’t have life-saving health care before — would gain that protection.

Even after the People of the State of Missouri finally bypassed the legislature and enacted Medicaid expansion by referendum, Republicans in my state did everything they possibly could to block the funding for it.

In the end, the Missouri Supreme Court had to force the Republican-dominated legislature to implement the law that had been passed by the People.

And it’s not just Missouri. This happens in state after state after state.

The number of Americans who die each year because Republicans refuse to provide all Americans with basic health care is roughly two to five times the total number of murders in the entire United States.

That’s not even remotely pro-life.

So when they go on and on about murders committed by illegal aliens… who currently make up about 3% of the population, and are therefore responsible for about 3% of the murders in America…

Just know that they themselves are responsible for roughly 100 times as many deaths in America as all homicides by all illegal aliens combined.

Even on such issues as lowering the cost of life-saving insulin to a reasonable price similar to what people in other countries pay — we’ve been paying up to ten times what insulin is sold for in similar countries such as the UK — it’s always Democrats who push to save people’s lives, and it’s Republican politicians who push, again and again, to sacrifice the lives of regular Americans for more corporate profit.

Some years back, I talked to a woman who worked as hard as she could every month just to come up with enough money to buy the insulin she needed to stay alive.

That was because the company that made it had jacked up the price of the insulin so high she could barely afford it.

Then the next month, she would do it all over again.

This same lady was deadly allergic to bee stings. When she was younger, she had never gone anywhere without an Epi-Pen, an antidote that could save her life if she happened to get stung.

But the pharmaceutical companies had jacked up the price of Epi-Pens up so high that she simply couldn’t afford to carry one. She was reduced to just hoping she wouldn’t get stung, have a reaction, and die before she could get help.

None of this is remotely pro-life.

I’ve Talked About the Negative Economic Consequences of Republican-Sponsored “Trickle-Down Economics.” What I Haven’t Talked About Is Its Death Toll.

Elsewhere, I’ve talked about the fact that Republican-sponsored “trickle-down economics” costs the typical family at least $2,000 every month, or $24,000 a year.

First off, it ought to be obvious that the reason 40,000 to 100,000 Americans die from lack of health care each year is almost always because they can’t afford it.

But there are likely even more deaths, directly and indirectly, from Republican “trickle-down economics.” In addition to some Americans dying from sheer lack of health care, others are dying from financial desperation.

For starters, we have about 50,000 suicides in the United States every year. And about one fourth of these — or about 12,500 — are caused by financial desperation.

Some twenty or so years ago, I myself came close to being one of these statistics. Unemployed, utterly broke with a family to support and no way forward that I could find, I became suicidally depressed.

Fortunately, I made it. A lot of people don’t.

Financial hopelessness also drives many Americans to drug and alcohol addiction.

We have roughly 110,000 deaths each year from drug overdoses, and about 95,000 more from alcohol addiction.

And much if not most of this is simply unnecessary. Elsewhere, I’ve talked in much more detail about how Republican policies are costing the typical family at least $2,000 every single month.

It’s difficult to quantify the total number of Americans who die every year from Republican-sponsored “trickle-down economics.”

But whatever it is, it’s a lot. If we could total it all up, it’s probably even higher than the number of Americans who die each year from lack of health care.

Republicans Are Anti-Life on Immigration.

Mauricio Amaya and his brother Santos were police officers in El Salvador. In 2017, after their sister Gloria was shot dead while riding on a motorcycle with Mauricio, the two brothers fled to the United States and sought asylum.

Although Santos had also received death threats from gang members, he was denied asylum here in the US, and deported in April of 2018.

He was murdered back in El Salvador that same month.

Although these kinds of deaths have happened under both Democrats and Republicans, it’s typically Republicans who are strongly against immigration from Latino countries, to the point of turning away even people fleeing for their lives from criminal gangs.

And it’s not just adults, either.

Republican politicians claim to care about children. But apart from a few commendable exceptions (such as Laura Bush, John McCain, Paul Ryan, and a few other Senators), very few Republicans stood up against the Trump administration’s horrific deliberate policy of ripping little children from their mothers’ arms in order to “discourage illegal immigration.”

Many of these children have suffered irreparable psychological and developmental damage as a result of the Trump administration’s actions that they will never fully recover from. That damage will be with them for the rest of their lives.

And brutality toward immigrants isn’t just a Republican policy at the national level. In Texas, Republican governor Greg Abbott has placed floating barriers in the Rio Grande River to prevent desperate people from swimming across the river into the United States. Desperate immigrants have been drowned in the river, cut up by razor wire, and literally shoved back into the Rio Grande.

That’s not pro-life.

If you’re a Christian, then you should know that five out of every six illegal immigrants are also Christians. According to the Bible, they are your “brothers and sisters in Christ.”

In Matthew 25, Jesus says that those who invited him in when he was a stranger (literally, “a foreigner”) are those who will inherit the kingdom of God. Those who refused to do so will receive eternal punishment.

When people object that they never saw him a stranger in need of help, Jesus replies, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did not do for me.”

It’s Not Even a Matter of Cost.

And Republican politicians do all of of the above even though illegal immigrants aren’t driving up crime, aren’t costing people anything long-term for the meager benefits they temporarily receive, and actually provide a small economic bonus for the typical native-born American family.

This is largely because they work long hard hours for low pay, picking our apples, plucking our chickens, and otherwise making up 30% to 50% of our agricultural work force.

The Republican hatred for immigrants is so strong that Donald Trump and JD Vance made it a major campaign issue to falsely accuse legal Haitian immigrants of abducting and eating the pets of native-born Americans.

At the risk of repeating myself: None of this is remotely pro-life.

But it’s not just immigrant children they don’t care that much about. The Republican Party isn’t even genuinely pro-life when it comes to native-born American kids.

Republicans Won’t Lift a Finger to Help Stop American School Children from Being Slaughtered by Mass Shooters and Other Gun Violence.

Even before we talk about this, you already know that every single time there’s a horrific mass shooting in an American public school, the only thing Republican politicians have to offer is “thoughts and prayers.”

This is in spite of the fact that gun violence is one of the major causes of death for American children — taking about as many of their lives as traffic accidents.

And it’s in spite of the fact that the vast majority of American voters, including Republican voters, support doing something to help stop the slaughter. Universal background checks, for example, are supported by close to 90% of us.

The Republican Party doesn’t just seem to care that much about children once they leave the womb and head to school.

Of course, this also includes such things as working to repeal school lunches for poor children.

In the Greatest Public Health Crisis of Our Lifetime, Republican Leaders Gave Us Hundreds of Thousands of Unnecessary Deaths.

What we needed during the COVID pandemic was for Americans, inspired by heroic leadership, to rally together as we did during World War II, and do everything we could to save American lives from an invisible but massively deadly enemy.

What we actually got was a President who treated the pandemic as a personal political problem rather than as the public health emergency it was.

Instead of setting a national example of following the recommendations of America’s best health authorities, Trump claimed the problem was simply going to magically go away, pretended it wasn’t as bad as it was, delayed on acting, publicly undermined and rebuked his own experts, refused to wear a mask, floated quack “cures,” refused to advocate that Americans get vaccinated, neglected to organize a coordinated federal response, and blamed everyone but himself.

In this, he was supported by other Republicans and right-wingers on TV and the internet who screamed that reasonable public health measures were “tyranny” — Democrats trying to seize permanent dictatorial control of citizens’ lives.

They also endlessly promoted false narratives that the virus was “only a cold,” and that it was actually the vaccines, not the disease, that were killing people.

In the end, COVID-19 killed close to three times as many Americans as those who died in World War II. At least 400,000 of these deaths were completely unnecessary.

And a very, very large portion of these unnecessary deaths were directly caused by so-called “pro-life” Republicans.

Republican Politicians Refuse to Address the Threat to People’s Lives from Climate Change.

It shouldn’t have to be said, but climate change is real, and it’s a major global emergency. We are long past the point at which there’s any real scientific doubt about this.

There’s definite potential for a large number of people to die from heat waves, increased storm events, droughts, crop failures, shortages of fresh water, flooding (with the very existence of small island nations like the Maldives and Tuvalu already threatened), and other side effects from climate change.

Our Republican leaders don’t seem to care much about these people’s lives. For decades, Republicans called climate change a “hoax,” following the lead of self-absorbed billionaires like the Koch brothers, who made over $100 billion as they relentlessly pushed climate change denial, so that they could avoid reasonable regulation that would’ve slowed their endless flood of profits.

Lately, as climate change has become undeniable, Republican politicians and media figures have shifted to accusing others of exaggerating the risks, making false claims about clean energy solutions, and so forth.

Anything to gum up the works.

Donald Trump went so far as to actually withdraw the United States from the global agreement to fight climate change. If reelected, he will do so again.

Republicans Are Anti-Life When It Comes to Executing People.

I understand the desire for justice to be served in cases of murder. And I’m not totally opposed to the death penalty, as long as it’s reserved for clear, cold-blooded murderers in cases in which there’s no doubt they did it.

But do we really have to execute people when significant doubt has arisen as to their actual guilt?

As I write this, minutes ago, a man named Marcellus Williams was just strapped to a gurney and put to death by prison officials here in my home state of Missouri. In light of doubts raised since Williams’ trial, the original prosecutor, several jurors, and even the victim’s family had asked that he not be executed.

We don’t know exactly how many people sentenced to death are actually innocent, but a pretty good estimate is about one 1 of every 25.

There was nothing wrong with simply letting Marcellus Williams continue to serve life in prison, especially in a case in which even the victim’s family didn’t want him put to death.

I just can’t think of any decent reason to put people to death when there is significant doubt about their innocence.

The case was appealed to the US Supreme Court.

Every Supreme Court Justice appointed by Democrats voted to hold off on the execution. Every Supreme Court Justice appointed by Republicans voted to let it go ahead. And so it did.

That’s not pro-life.

Republican Politicians Don’t Care About Worker Safety.

A good example of this is a couple of months ago, when House Republicans moved to slash funding for the Department of Labor, slash funding for the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, and specifically mandate that no federal dollars could be used to lower coal miners’ risk of black lung disease.

This is all part of a larger push for more billionaire and corporate profits over the lives and health of Americans. The Trump administration rolled back more than 100 life-saving environmental rules.

We Could Keep Listing Examples, But Hopefully the Point Has Been Made.

Don’t imagine that I’ve exhausted the list of all the ways in which the Republican Party is the exact opposite of actually being pro-life. I haven’t.

Any time there is a choice between more profits for billionaire donors and big corporations, and lives of regular people, you can always count on the Republican Party to sacrifice your interest and mine.

In spite of their marketing, these people are not genuinely pro-life in any way, on any issue, from abortion on down the list.

Instead, they are the exact opposite.

They are anti-life on every significant issue.