The federal government executed Brandon Bernard this Thursday. Yesterday, they executed Alfred Bourgeois. They were, respectively, the 16th and 17th people executed in the United States this year, and the ninth and tenth executed by the federal government.
The federal government didn’t have to execute these ten people. There was no legal requirement. Since 2003, federal executions had been stalled. A choice was made to resume executions. By an administration that has touted itself as historically…”pro-life.”
The death penalty does not draw a unified response from those who identify as pro-life. For some, pro-life thought is limited to the matter of abortion. For others, it includes the death penalty and euthanasia. For more, it informs views on immigration and refugees. Pro-life thinking isn’t entirely unified. It’s hard to say how unified it is at all, really, when the Catholic Church is beseeching one of its members, the Attorney General of the United States, to stop ordering the killings of American prisoners.
Or maybe it is easy to say. Maybe the answer is simply that the pro-life movement isn’t unified. This bloc of voters, this coalition of churches, this swath of advocates: It’s a wide-ranging group, condensed into the words “pro-life” without a real examination of what “pro-life” means.
So what does it mean? Well, it could mean just anti-abortion, and to some, it evidently does, with “pro-life” political leadership seemingly intent on a vision of a “pro-life” country that looks about like this one, except with abortion doctors classified as criminals and treated thusly.
But it could also mean something better.
It could mean pro-life. And that envisioned country could be one in which life really is the priority: A country in which the criminal justice system is designed to rehabilitate. A country in which those fleeing oppression and violence have a home, with the many who are willing allowed to welcome them with local, societal support. A country in which, rather than adding the “except in cases of rape and incest” caveat, we focus on ending rape and incest. A country in which an eye is not exchanged for an eye, and we do not take on the role of God, deciding as a state who lives and who dies.
The pro-life movement, if it can be called a movement, has defining to do. There are factions vying for the title, whether intentionally or not. I hope the pro-life one wins.
