In all the hubbub about Emily Letts’s abortion video, nobody seems to have pointed out the obvious: It doesn’t show an abortion.
Letts, a 25-year-old abortion counselor from New Jersey, filmed herself terminating a pregnancy to prove that a woman can have a positive abortion experience. In the article that she wrote for Cosmopolitan and in follow-up interviews, Letts says that she wants to “help stop the stigma” of the abortion procedure.
“We talk about abortion so much and yet no one really knows what it actually looks like,” Letts said.
Well, I watched the abortion video and I can tell you, I still don’t know what abortion looks like.
Emily, if you’re going to make an abortion video, make an abortion video. When I pressed play, I was, admittedly, nervous about what I would see. I watched half of the video with one eye open, in case I had to close both to shield myself from any graphic images.
But after the video ended, I couldn’t help but say to myself, “That’s it?” The entire procedure is filmed from the waist up and all the viewer can see is Emily’s smiling face. (Yes, smiling.) The rest is just Emily talking to the camera.
In an era when one can readily find people’s videos of their colonoscopies and schoolchildren are required to watch the Miracle of Birth, in which a baby is filmed actually exiting a woman’s body, one would think that a widely discussed “abortion video” would actually show an abortion.
If there were no title to the video and no sound, you could easily have concluded Letts was getting a bee sting removed from a very unfortunate area. For all of her talk about “sharing her story” and “removing the stigma,” Letts managed to whitewash the issue, as the Left is so good at doing, and produce a PG-rated, three-minute commercial for herself.
Toward the end of the video, Letts films herself speaking about the abortion a month later. She says that she is “in awe of the fact that she can create a life.” Emily, if you admit that the fetus in your womb was a life and you caused that fetus to cease to exist, then are you not ending a life/killing someone? (Kaboom! You’ve been lawyered.)
As Breitbart.com pointed out, Letts’s admission that the abortion was “right for me and no-one else” is a Freudian slip. Exactly, no one else. As an abortion counselor, she is around abortions constantly, so of course she is desensitized to it and can leave the clinic without feeling a shred of guilt.
Of course filming someone so desensitized to the whole process is going to create a “positive” video. Letts says that what she “really wanted to address in my video is guilt.” She states that she does not feel guilty about her decision and that therefore other women shouldn’t “pressure themselves to feel bad about it” either. She seems to forget that not all women are abortion counselors. When these women feel guilty, that is their natural reaction, not the bubbly excitement that Letts exudes.
Letts has admitted that she was not on any form of birth control and the man was never involved in the decision-making process. She has since stated, in an interview with HuffPost Live that she “knew she was going to be called a whore” for making the video.
I’m not going to call you a whore, Emily, but I may call you profoundly lazy and irresponsible. Perhaps a more interesting video would have been you walking the two blocks to your local CVS and picking up a pack of condoms.
— Christine Sisto is an editorial assistant at National Review.