As I write this, thousands of young people are celebrating their graduation from Notre Dame. They've worked hard to get here. Since birth, they've been cared for, nurtured, fed, educated and tended to. They've explored, tried, created, learned and discovered who they are, what they want to do and be in the world. It's been a long and complicated process. A complicated and excited state of perpetual development. It is life.

As I write this, hundreds of people who claim to be pro-life are protesting this day. Rather than looking at the thousands of lives that are the aggregation of millions of achievements, they are focusing on their own tiny definition of the word life. They are focusing on birth. And any thinking person will tell you that birth and life are not synonyms. They are focusing on the beginning as if it is the point. It isn't.

And it is worth noting that they are doing this because President Obama, who is pro-choice, is speaking at the Notre Dame graduation. Our first African American president, speaking at the graduation of thousands of students, and this is what they chose to see?

I am watching them do this, overshadow the achievements of all these students in order to express their own opinion, and all I can think is "pro-life, my ass." Life is about living, not about being born.

Just to find out if I was "right" about that, I found a good definition of the word on Wikipedia:

Living organisms are capable of growth and reproduction, some can communicate and many can adapt to their environment through changes originating internally. A physical characteristic of life is that it feeds on negative entropy. In more detail, according to physicists such as John Bernal, Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, and John Avery, life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form.

Yes, it's kind of science-geeky, but here's my take-away. Life is about taking in nutrients - physical, emotional, intellectual, social - and using them to fuel growth and development. It is also about the ability to reject the degraded forms of things that are harmful or no longer useful. (You know, like poop. Or like the ability to reject negative and harmful messaging that hinders us rather than helps us grow.)

So, I'm watching this pro-life protest, and I wonder what part of life it is that they are protecting? I think they are pro-birth, not pro-life.

• Pro-life people would recognize that a college graduation is the culmination of successfully being nourished by a society that values these lives. And they would fight much harder to end the inequalities faced by thousands of kids who never get that chance. That would be pro-life. These people are just pro-birth.
• Pro-life people would be able to recognize the obvious irony that so many unintended pregnancies result from lack of access to education and healthcare that make unintended pregnancy less likely.
• Pro-life people would realize that for many teens the future is an obscure concept belonging to other people - people with homes, jobs, cars, parents - and they don't believe they have a future, much less plan for one. (I heard this time and time again when I was a teacher in the juvenile detention system in Saint Louis.) Pro-life people would work tirelessly to improve the lives of these disenfranchised youth, helping them find their future. Pro-birth people just want them to have a baby, someone else can raise it.
• Pro-life people would work to make sure that all of us had access to the kinds of education that would make it possible for us to not only earn a living, but make a valuable contribution to our society that would, in turn, enrich the lives of those with whom we live in a community. Pro-birth people just want to make sure we have babies, leave the educating up to someone else.
• Pro-life people would know that part of healthy living is access to healthful food and nourishment and would work to make sure that the most at-risk amongst us had fresh food that was full of nutrients rather than chemicals and fat. Pro-birth people? I don't know, they'd make sure that babies were born, not necessarily fed.
• Pro-life people know that things like immunizations and regular visits to doctors, dentists and ophthalmologists help us live healthier lives. Pro-life people would work to create these systems of healthy living.

And look, the irony is not lost on me that so many of these pro-life protestors are the same people who will turn around and tell us how to live. That we can't have sex until we're married, (heaven help us if we want to have sex with someone of the same sex!) What kind of art is appropriate, or what kinds of books to read, clothes to wear, jobs to have etc... It seems to me that these are often the same people who put all sorts of prohibitions on the things that are, well, that are LIFE. On the very freedoms and creative expressions that allow us to discover who we are, what we want to be and do in the world.

Life is messy. It is dirty, fun, wild, creative, unpredictable and sometimes even kinky. There is not a right way to do it. But there are plenty of wrong ways, and those almost always involve denying someone else - through action, deed, intentional inequality or denial of access - the right to live their own lives fully, healthfully and fruitfully.

These people are not pro-life. A pro-life person would celebrate the hard work, diversity, opportunity and potential inherent on graduation day. A pro-life person would drink in the dialog and look forward to the evolution of our ideas as a society and as people. A pro-life person would know that every moment - even birth - is just a blip on the road in the never-ending evolution of our species (and our individual lives.)

And at some point, a pro-life person would stop judging other people and just go LIVE THEIR OWN LIVES.

It's fine if you're pro-birth. But admit it. Because if you were pro-life, you'd realize that you've picked the tiniest possible moment in life to defend, and forsaken the whole rest of it - the part that is hard. You want to call yourself pro-life? Well, then fight for the living!

It's a cop out. And I, for one, want the word "life" back. And I want the freedom to live it.