Are ‘pro-lifers’ pro-life?

I was in conversation, with a friend, and he said, “capital punishment is euthanasia”. He was exactly right.

I have seen many people denounce abortion, and yet favor execution by the state, offensive and defensive war, torture, increasing poverty and gun proliferation. I have seen the same people object to government welfare programmes. They invent specious and vacuous arguments as premises, the academic logic is absent. Usually they ARE against assisted suicide and other sorts of euthanasia.

To be pro-life, one must be more than anti-abortion. Some of the intellectual divides are hard to make, others should be extremely easy. How can a moral person be for torture or elective war? They can not be, by definition.

Capital punishment can be just, when the crime is great enough, and the individual who is responsible is the one to be executed. The state has a judicial and political right to do so. Capital punishment is still death, it is a form of euthanasia. It has been applied haphazardly and unjustly often. It is not the christian response! It is pro-death.

Sometimes it is a choice of the lesser of two evils. I also belief in the just war theory. But, in modern war, increasingly, just war does not approach the thresholds of justness. Modern war is, primarily, the killing of non-combatants. In bushjr’s iraq war people LIED, completely, about it being a ‘just war’, when it only was just war for the purpose of war, and of course the whole thing was based on lies.

― To be pro-choice on abortion is to be pro-death.
― To be pro-war is to be pro-death.
― To be pro-euthanasia is to be pro-death.
― To be pro-capital punishment is to be pro-death.
― Capital punishment is euthanasia.
― To be pro-torture is to be pro-death.
― Gun proliferation is pro-death.
― Extending poverty is pro-death.
― Drug abuse and its black market is pro-death.
― O, yes many, many people are pro-death.

Killing is never good. Some may say, some killing is more egregious than others, and some killing is not so bad. I will agree, that, some is more senseless, and more cruel. All killing is bad. People have a right to self-defense, but killing is still evil.

To-day, is Shavous, the pentecost of the hebrews, fifty days after Passover. Shavous is the day Moses received the Ten Commandments. One commandment is “Thou shalt not kill.” The command is not modified, nor conditional.*

It is simple. To be pro-life is to be anti-death, to be pro-death is to be anti-life. There is nothing being justified. No killing, do not engage in killing, “Thou shalt not kill.” To say: this killing is acceptable....this killing is good... this killing is unacceptable... this killing is bad... is being pro-choice, it is making selections at the life and death cafeteria. People who call themselves “pro-choice” are some times pro-life on this fetus, and some time pro-death on that one. A person who is truly, pro-life has a catholic consistency, he does not pick and choose, and reject entrées, so as to be a cafeteria pro-lifer.

These and other acts are all pro-death. I believe in consistency. I disdain double standards. I believe in christian mercy and clemency.

If one is TRULY pro-life, he must be broadly pro-life, not narrowly and selectively. “Pro-choice” people are narrowly and selectively pro-abortion, or pro-life on pregnancies.

I know, when people say “pro-life”, they mean anti-abortion, sometimes exclusively. Honestly, they are two different terms, in which “pro-life” is inclusive of the other, and being inclusive, is the broader, and therefore, should be recognised as such.

If one is only speaking of abortion, then one is either pro-abortion, or anti-abortion. Pro-life and pro-choice are not logical, twin, diametrically, opposite alternatives. When there is one issue and two views, one must be pro and the other con (or anti). Having two ‘pros’ is debate trickery, it is a falsity. I have argued what ‘pro-life’ is; ‘pro-choice’ is only a cover for pro-abortion, it is duplicitous.

I am pro-life and anti-abortion, or anti-abortion and pro-life! One is not pro-life, in actuality, if they are ONLY anti-abortion. In our recent christian past, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Pope John Paul the Great, Joseph Bernardin†, and Oscar Romero were genuinely, consistently pro-life.
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noto bene: this was a continuation, of a point of the last essay.
*(this is a postscript clarification) The Latin is simple, “Non occídes”; but the Hebrew verb used, “r-ṣ-ḥ”, is more flexible. There is debate, that, the prohibition is of murder. Semantics sometimes matter a lot. Is it general and absolute? or vague? or poetic? “Non occídes” is St. Jerome's learned translation of Hebrew c. a.D. 400. English translation of academic Hebrew c.a.D. 2000 may be “Do not murder”.
†Joseph Cardinal Bernardin gave the Gannon lecture at Fordham, on 6 December 1983. “The spectrum of life cuts across the issues of genetics, abortion, capital punishment, modern warfare and the care of the terminally ill.”