The new face of pro-life

Alienated by the rhetoric of the old-school pro-life movement, a new generation of students brings fresh ideas to an old debate

by David Andrew Stoler

Twenty-five-year-old Andy Shen is talking about the last Ramones show ever on this planet. "They played `I Wanna Be Sedated' as the last song -- it was really good. I'm in the video. They show this shot of the crowd, and you can see me crowd surfing," he says. We are in Shen's East Side apartment, decorated in typical fin-de-siècle college student: a Nintendo 64 is tangled up in front of the television and oft-owned couch; posters for alterna-bands like the Muffs intermingle with David Hockney prints, all hanging above a mantle covered with ornate bottles of alcohol.

Shen's hair is shaved on the sides, punk style, and he's wearing skater sneakers, baggy jeans, and a black jacket with the logo of the punk band All in large letters across the back. Tomorrow, the Brown University medical student will leave for London to complete the month-and-a-half-long neurological cycle of his studies, and then he will be Andy Shen, M.D.

In some ways, it's hard enough to believe that Shen is just six weeks shy of being a full-fledged doctor. Emergency medicine, no less. But what's even more surprising is that this punk/doctor is pro-life. "I think the killing of a fetus is murder," he says. "I think abortion is murder. And that is wrong."

Almost at the same time, though, Shen quickly tries to distance himself from the traditional purveyors of the pro-life message, who, he says, are out of touch with the direction in which the pro-life movement is going and even have alienated a good portion of the people who might back their cause. "The people who tend to be heard tend to be from the extremes," he says. "If you're not a kind of Ralph Reed Republican, it's kind of embarrassing."

Today, Shen is one of a new kind of pro-lifer, part of a new group of non-traditional young adults from all sorts of religious and political backgrounds getting involved in a debate that has raged in our nation since US Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun authored the historic Roe v. Wade in 1973. And just as Blackmun, who passed last week (see "Blackmun's legacy," page 11), was one of the last vestiges of the old pro-choice movement, a voice that helped define the vocabulary with which they rally today, Shen is a stunning example of a new pro-life faction that isn't even necessarily anti-choice.

Traditionally thought of as a station for staunchly conservative, religiously aggressive older white men and women, the face of today's pro-life movement includes an increasing number of normally leftist groups -- Feminists for Life in America, the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians, Punks for Life --who are coaxing fence-sitters onto the pro-life sides with sensitive and commonsensical arguments that get away from or even dismiss the old-school baby-killer rhetoric.

And perhaps nowhere is that face becoming more pronounced than on college campuses, where groups such as American Collegians for Life, National College Students for Life, and their local affiliates, such as Providence College's PC for Life, are seeing more students with non-conservative ideals join the pro-life ranks. According to Serrin Foster, the executive director of Feminists for Life in America, these groups are essentially a descendant of the women's rights movement of the '70s, which, for the first time, demanded that people think consciously and engage in open discussions about all the implications surrounding women's issues.

As proof of this new trend, Foster points to a recent UCLA study showing that up to "half of the freshman entering college reject abortion." Of course, this doesn't automatically mean that half of the students entering college support pro-life goals, but it does mean that more students are thinking about the issues involved in the debate, that they are using the liberal process of thought and discussion to come to their own conclusions.

And so Shen, who has come to be a very non-traditional member of what has been, until recently, an exclusively conservative club. For example, Shen tends to vote Democrat, has no problem with gay marriage, and is in favor of mandated social services despite all the big-government red tape that he knows that implies. And, get this, Shen would not actually make abortion illegal. Instead, he says, "I think abortion should be legal. I feel that we should work to reduce the problem."

Shen advocates for counseling services for women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant and a generally increased dialogue about abortion and the issues surrounding it. But like many new pro-life students, Shen has found that while he has inherited more of the process of the original women's movement, pro-choicers have inherited more of the message.

As a result, those in favor of abortion are often criticized for their refusal to even discuss the issue with liberal pro-life students and for simply condemning all pro-lifers as misogynists who would rather see a return of the coat hanger than legal choice. Indeed, students who are pro-life, and even those who are just trying to figure out where they stand, say they are usually met with an environment that is, if not openly hostile to their points of view, at least not the laboratory of Socratic questioning that the nation traditionally credits its universities as being.

Tim Garrett, a staff worker and campus volunteer at the Brown Christian Fellowship, for example, finds that, while the university prides itself on its open dialogue, the discourse quickly reverts to name-calling and aggressive rhetoric when people try to discuss views that veer from the liberal norm. "This phenomenon isn't restricted to the abortion debate," Garrett wrote in a recent e-mail. "It is my opinion that Brown plays oppressor to an entire list of beliefs/ schools of thought and silences (in a subtle, inactive sort of way) anything that could, on the surface, be construed as `traditional,' `mainstream,' or `conservative,' without an honest inquiry into one's motivation."

FOR 20 YEAR-OLD KALI WALLACE, that honest inquiry into the motivation of her assumed personal beliefs didn't happen until she came to Brown from her native Colorado Springs. "Being from Colorado Springs, everyone is against abortion. Coming to school . . . someone said something and I thought, `Well, why do I feel this way?' " says Wallace. Before, "it wasn't even an issue."

So what happened? Wallace explains that, during her first-year orientation, she found herself in the middle of one workshop after another that not only stressed liberal thought and openness but very pointed messages about issues she hadn't thought too much about. And so Wallace thought about it. She weighed the sides, listened to the pro-choice discussions and finally came to the conclusion that "the argument that an unborn human isn't a human just doesn't make sense."

But because the door to liberal debate at Brown tends to be closed to her pro-life thoughts, Wallace often finds herself put instantly on the defensive about her views. As a result, she says, she rarely sets straight those people who "just kind of assume" that she is pro-choice. "People like me who go to college . . . you get there and . . . all these people are telling me I'm wrong," Wallace says. "I don't like to argue, so I don't say anything."

According to many pro-life college students, Wallace's experience is typical. They say that they come to campus wanting to think and talk about an issue that has been over-burdened by rhetoric and bad feeling. But rather than meeting others interested in that discussion, they encounter prejudiced thoughts about the type of people who are pro-life. "I was really surprised at what people thought. Some people are like, `You must be a religious fanatic from the West,' " Wallace says.

Shen blames this kind of stereotyping on those pro-lifers who "fill the air with hatred . . . tied into this kind of mean-spirited Republican movement." Every time a doctor gets shot or a clinic gets bombed, "it hurts," says Shen.

And this hurt then estranges those people who might think abortion is wrong from a pro-life standpoint. "People don't want to be associated with a misogynist, so if you can remove that stereotype, maybe it's okay for other kinds of people to [be pro-life]," Wallace says.

But what happens instead is that people who may be on the fence about abortion, who may think that abortion is a bad thing but see the hypocrisy of a mean and violent old-school pro-life movement, either keep out of it or judge by the wrong factors. And these inherent prejudices end up standing in the way of a dialogue that might help other students come to grips with why they feel the way they do about abortion. In other words, the students are kept from coming up with thoughtful and sensitive solutions to a situation that often tears at the collective heart of this nation.

Says Garrett, the Brown Christian Fellowship worker, "The thing that is dangerous is that the two sides are set in opposition to each other -- like a pro-life student doesn't cherish choice. It's like arguing with your angry father -- there's no point to it until you can agree to give some sort of respect and validity to what others are saying."

Wallace, too, finds it ironic that even though the root of the word "liberal" is linked to the idea of free thought, many of the folks who consider themselves liberal are intensely close-minded. "It's assumed that if you're a liberal, you're . . . liberal. It doesn't mean believing in new things anymore," she says. "It's kind of unfortunate - it is hard to define how someone who is free-thinking would be called."

OF COURSE, NOT ALL SCHOOLS ARE as liberal as Brown. John McBrine, a sophomore at Providence College majoring in social work, is also part of the new pro-life movement. He's an athlete who plays indoor soccer, and he has public-service credentials that would make many left-leaning folks feel guilty. The North Attleboro native volunteers with the elderly, helps teach adult literacy, and says that his political bearings tend to land him "both in the middle and a little toward the left." McBrine is also one of the student leaders of PC for Life, the Providence College pro-life group that, with 40 active members, is one of the largest in Rhode Island.

McBrine came to the pro-life movement in a way that best symbolizes the new thought process separating new pro-lifers from old -- he came to college and found he needed to reassess his feelings about many issues, abortion included. "College is a time to look critically at things, to be very investigative," he says. And the philosophy classes he took as a freshman both demanded that he question his beliefs and gave him "a background to question these things."

The pull of abortion in particular, he says, came simply because of the sociological scope of it. "It's one of the biggest issues in America. It has such consequence," he says.

And although being pro-life on PC's Catholic campus is a bit easier than at Brown, McBrine says that even here there are problems. "Just last night we were talking about the pins [that PC for Life passes out on campus], and we were met with a degree of hostility. It's an attitude we get," he says.

Generally, though, McBrine sees the movement changing, becoming more publicly valid, as evidenced by the numbers involved in the PC for Life group and by the nature of the activities with which they demonstrate their views. Along with handing out pins, the PC group volunteers at a home for troubled (read: pregnant) woman in North Attleboro, an activity that McBrine says is essential. "Give them an alternative -- that's what we want to do," he says, trying to impart the message that being pro-life involves not only demonstration but advocacy.

And so the new face, the new side of pro-life. Perhaps softer, certainly different. Made up of homosexuals and punks, Democrats and Socialists. People, simply, and often people you wouldn't expect, escaping the rhetoric and thinking on to an organized group, some trying to change the movement from within. All not necessarily holding the beliefs that you would think -- supporting gay marriage, birth control, and even, as anathematic as it might sound, choice itself. And this, McBrine hopes, is opening up the debate, broadening the pool of people who can take place in it. "I think it's not as viewed as radical," he says. "It's more socially acceptable."

David Andrew Stoler can be reached at dstoler@gis.net.