The AHCA is Not Pro-Life

If you support the American Health Care Act, you’ll have a very hard time convincing me you’re actually pro-life. There is nothing pro-life about stripping away our health care laws and leaving the poorest and sickest among us at the mercy of profit-driven insurance companies. Many people who most need health insurance—people just like me—are simply not profitable to fully insure. We need laws and regulations to protect us from attempts to make a profit off us, like annual and lifetime caps for insurance coverage, being charged more because we have health issues, or being denied coverage for our expensive medical conditions. The AHCA guts protective measures like these, prioritizing profit over people. It’s anything but pro-life.

But sadly that’s not exactly surprising. The “pro-life” movement has long focused only on a single issue while ignoring a host of other threats to human life. Worse, many who claim to champion pro-life policies support atrocities like war and capital punishment, not to mention the AHCA and other attacks on our healthcare system that work against their stated goals. That irony and hypocrisy is not lost on those outside conservative Christianity, and it’s part of why increasingly many people are leaving the church and believe it does more harm than good. It breaks my heart to see the church viewed this way, even more so because it is a reasonably fair view.

That’s why we need to rethink what it means to be pro-life. Not just to fix the perception of the church, but to bring consistency to the term and to actually work as agents of God’s love in protecting the inherent value of human life. We need to redefine “pro-life” so it means more than a narrow-minded focus on a single issue. “Pro-life” needs to mean a commitment to protecting and supporting lives wherever they are threatened, no matter what those lives might look like or what they might have done. By contrast, the AHCA implies that only some lives are worth protecting, by virtue of their financial or health status, and others are not. It sends the message that the poor, the sick, and the marginalized are not worth caring for. And that’s about as anti-life as a healthcare policy can be.