Without one having any other social or political context, "pro-life" sounds like the stance you would take if you were, well, all for life and living. In short, it sounds awesome!
It sounds like a happy, healthy, up-with-people, save-the-world kind of view. After all, who could be against life? Life is beautiful. The opposite of pro-life would be ... what? Pro-death? Ack! Only freaky goth types or gimlet-eyed killers would turn out to support that cause.
If you declared yourself to be ardently "pro-life" to the visitor fresh off the spaceship from Alpha Centauri, he'd think you to be a swell person. He'd peg you as being against abortion, sure, but surely you'd also be working to eliminate the death penalty and suicide (both of which mean you'd be interested in wiping out poverty and other human misery and in finding better treatments for mental illness) and war. War would be a huge source of worry for you, because you realize that no matter how noble or righteous a nation's reasons for going to war, it always leads to an enormous amount of death and suffering.
And you'd give money to researchers doing work to extend the human lifespan. You'd be all in support of seatbelts, helmet laws, and OSHA requirements. You'd be working to eliminate the ready availability of guns and poisons. You'd want to rid public places of smoking, that's for sure, and you'd try to educate smokers on the dangers of their nicotine habit.
As soon as the words "All of life is sacred and created for a purpose" left your lips, you'd realize that you'd never, ever harm another living thing to support your beliefs.
You might consider speaking out against birth control -- more babies means more life to hold sacred, right? -- but then you'd have a good hard think and realize that "all life" includes the plants and animals on the lovely planet Earth.
Instead of hunting in the fall, you take hay bales to the woods so the deer don't starve. You start to adopt animals from the pound whenever you can -- the unwanted children you've been fostering love having kitties and puppies to play with. You and the kids start planting trees and setting up community gardens. And in addition to your volunteer work on the various crisis lines, you start helping out at the local wildlife rehabilitation center.
And then you'd start to see the terrible damage that cars, pesticides, and habitat loss are doing to wildlife. You realize that uncontrolled human population growth and consumption are driving many plant and animal species to extinction.
You do a little reading in basic biology, and you realize that humans, like every other animal species on the face of the planet, are designed to produce far more babies than the environment can support because in the wild so few would survive infancy. A healthy human woman has a solid 25 or 30 years of fertility -- if she married young and went without birth control, she could have 10, 15, maybe even 20 kids! And one human baby in a developed country consumes as much planetary energy in a year as a sperm whale. Ack!
You'd start to realize that human life comes at great cost to the other life on the planet. But you'd be determined to stick to your ideals.
You start small. You get rid of your car and use your own two feet or a bicycle to get around to eliminate poisonous emissions and the chance you might accidentally hit an animal or another person. You stop using pesticides (mice and insects are life, too! Better to discourage their presence than kill them) and start buying organic produce. You'd certainly stop eating meat and fish; you'd probably become a fruitarian.
You simplify your life so that you use as few natural resources as possible -- and no non-self-generated electricity if possible -- and you'd encourage others to do the same. All so the rest of Earth's life can keep on living.
Wait! That's not what "pro-life" means, silly!
Indeed, many people who label themselves as "pro-life" are primarily concerned with preserving human life, and in particular the lives of the unborn.
So in many ways, "pro-life" is a crackerjack bit of good marketing that was first used in the 1960s (if you believe Wikipedia) or 1973 (if you believe the Catholic Bishops' Association), but it is a fundamentally nebulous and misleading label.
Certainly, there's no ideological compulsion to want to save other species from extinction or to work against the death penalty if one is against abortion. You can dislike abortion for a whole host of reasons that are independent of any of your other views.
But to use the term "pro-life" to describe a person who cares deeply about protecting the innocent unborn but cares equally deeply that criminals be executed and that his or her rights to shoot animals for fun be protected ... well, that definition of "pro-life" seems a bit narrow and misleading in the grand scheme of things. Seriously, is the other 99.99% of the life on the planet that is not composed of human fetuses irrelevant somehow?
If you're against abortion and against obfuscation and spin doctoring, why not be a bit more specific when describing your views in 30 words or less? Call yourself "pro fetal life" or "pro mass birthing of {insert ethnicity here} babies" or "pro forcing immoral fornicators to bear the fruit of their sins" if that's what you believe.
But if you want to stick with the general, a better term that should be applied is "anti-abortion", which of course sounds clinical and not nearly as compelling as "pro-life".
The pro abortion rights contingent decided to use the label "pro-choice", which also is somewhat nebulous but doesn't sound nearly as cool as "pro-life". Choice is great and all, but in the grand scheme of things, it sounds like a luxury. This is life we're talking about! Life, people!
If you're paying attention to media bias, watch to see which newspapers and networks refer to "pro-life activists" and "pro-choice activists" and which use the less politically loaded terms "anti-abortion activists" and "abortion rights activists". The differences in news coverage can be quite educational.