All Our Lives

All Our Lives has repeatedly-and civilly, respectfully- attempted to dialogue with both prolife and prochoice groups so that we can actively cooperate with them on abortion-reducing measures. With prolifers, we have mostly tried to address widespread myths about contraception that deter support for it. With prochoicers, we have mostly expressed our solidarity on matters like voluntary family planning and our willingness to bring the message to constituencies they have not reached.

Not that we haven't gotten any positive responses-but the negative, dismissive ones have outnumbered them. We won't mention any names, but here are but two examples.

• We try to share the news of our "Family Planning Freedom Is Prolife" presentation on the social media page of a prolife group that professes neturality on "artificial" contraception, even though we known many members who support it. Our post is swiftly removed, but the administrator gives no reason for its removal-nor are we violating any policy known or accessible to us. To test whether this was some flukish glitch, we post our announcement again. Once again, it is swiftly deleted.
• We join an initiative devoted to action on a measure indispensible to alleviating the root cause of abortion, but does not itself involve abortion. We are the only prolife group involved, but we have found nothing in this initiative's policies that suggests we are not permitted to join. Some members welcome us warmly, but others feel so strongly that this is a prochoice-only cause and a prochoice-only space, we are summarily ejected from the campaign.

We won't stop trying to network. The human cost of *not* striving for cooperative action is just too high.

But if you're someone who has censored and blown us off already: kindly please reconsider. And if you're someone who is inclined to censor and blow us off in the future: kindly please stop it already.

Let's talk. What do we all have to lose if we *don't*? More than that, what do we all have to gain?