Terrisa Bukovinac, the atheist founder of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), answered the question of how, as an atheist, she can be pro-life.
“I am against murder,” Bukovinac said. “I don’t want to live in a world where people murder each other.”
And while she does not believe in life after death or that God will exact judgment in the end, Bukovinac said the unborn “only have one chance to experience this rare conscious experience of the universe.”
“Who has the right to take that from them?” she asked. “I don’t believe anyone does.”
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PAAU protesters were at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago last month, bearing placards reading, ‘Kamala is a Baby Killer Cop,’ ‘Queer rights begin at Conception,’ ‘Abortion pills Suffocate tiny People,’ and, ‘Embryos are people and Abortion is Murder.’
Bukovinac, who formerly led Democrats for Life, founded the Washington DC-based PAAU in 2021 as a single-issue organization and has been involved in the pro-life cause for nearly a decade. She together with PAAU associate Lauren Handy discovered the bodies of five premature-sized aborted babies and remains of over a hundred first-trimester babies at a Washington, D.C., abortion facility in March 2022. The case has spotlighted controversy and questions surrounding late-term abortion procedures and limits.
In an interview, Bukovinac underlined her group’s focus on “progressive feminist values of equality, non-violence, and nondiscrimination through an anti-capitalist lens,” but “committed to ending elective abortion no matter how long it takes, as well as inclusivity of pro-life voices, “magnifying secular, leftist, and LGBTQIA+ identifying pro-life voices, especially those belonging to people of color.”
Bukovinac said that in a world where both abortion and exploitation of poor people are abetted it is much more complicated, costly, and difficult to manage unplanned pregnancies. She called abortion “a band-aid solution,” and noted that people have been similarly killing children throughout history and have “found a way of making it okay.”
Bukovinac said she was aware of the radical abortion support expressed by the Democratic party and its presidential nominee Kamala Harris and called for opposition to the party’s pro-abortion platform.
“It is absolutely critical for leftists to dissent from the Democratic party,” she said. “It is essential that they see other people who have those same beliefs about the world and how things should be and recognize that abortion is genocide. I’m not a blue-dog Democrat, a conservative Democrat. I am progressive and pro-life.”
PAAU activists protested throughout the DNC, where Bukovinac said her group was greeted with curiosity from progressives, which was different from what they encountered at the Republican National Convention.
“It was especially interesting to contrast it with the Republican National Convention, where people were extremely hostile,” she said. “We were assaulted multiple times at the RNC and constantly told to go home and that pro-lifers are ruining the Republican party. But the attitude at the DNC was very different.”
Bukovinac observed from her time at the DNC that progressives are “turning their backs on the Democratic party. So, there was a sense of camaraderie among opponents of the Democratic platform.”
PAAU executive director Caroline Taylor Smith, who has worked for Protect Life Michigan and volunteers for Democrats for Life, reported a similar experience at the DNC.
“We spent a few days protesting outside the Planned Parenthood bus outside the convention, where abortions were being carried out,” she said. According to reports, Planned Parenthood carried out vasectomies and at least two dozen abortions at the DNC.
Smith also recalled how PAAU was present at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, where she also said, “The reception was very different.”
At the DNC, she said, “there was confusion when they saw that we’re pro-life and progressive. It was an interesting contrast to the RNC, which was not what we expected.”
“We went to the RNC to call out the party for its watered-down stance on abortion,” said Smith. “They actually confirmed and released it during the convention. We called them out and shamed them for abandoning babies.”
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She said that her fellow activists told RNC attendees that the Republican party is “betraying unborn people and collaborating with the abortion industry. We believe they are trying to get more votes by softening their stance on abortion. That angered a lot of people. They found it insulting. It was very weird and not what we expected.”
On July 8, the RNC adopted language on abortion that removed the previous “right to life” language from the platform and its call for a federal law protecting unborn babies that had been in place for decades.
Previous platforms had underlined that unborn children have a “fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed” and called for a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to life.
Republican nominee Donald Trump praised the platform change.
Where the RNC arguably watered down the pro-life planks in its platform, the DNC put abortion front and center as a top priority.
Harris pulled no punches on her abortion stance in her August 22 speech accepting her party’s nomination. She slammed former President Trump for appointing Supreme Court judges who overturned Roe v. Wade. She erroneously claimed that as a president he would enact a nationwide abortion ban, even without Congressional approval, claiming that Trump and Republicans “are out of their minds” on abortion.
Smith said that while PAAU was not in existence when Trump nominated justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, she and Bukovinac both agree that the ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, which devolved laws regarding abortion unto the states, was a pro-life victory, even though she dissented from other Republican policies.
“As an organization, we have to work with who we’re going to get,” she said. “Getting those justices into the court was a critical step for the pro-life movement and one we didn’t expect. Now, we have to work at the local and state level.”
