Could a new year mean new coalitions?
Could a new year mean new coalitions?
I hate that politics and media are the main venues for talking (yelling) about abortion. I even want to apologize to you for that. Law and politics are necessary, of course. And when the Supreme Court insisted on taking it upon itself to legalize abortion in all three trimesters in Roe v. Wade, it forced us into a half-century-long struggle. All the while, abortions happened. Unborn children were lost, women were hurt, and so were families (including potential ones). And we got used to it. What a mess we’re in.
As you may know, ending abortion as we know it is a priority for me. I have some loyal readers who email me saying that this priority is actually a desire to “control women.” To them I say: I can barely keep my own life in order, I promise I have no desire to try to direct yours or your wife’s or daughter’s. At the same time, I know enough women who have had abortions to know that abortions immiserate women and harm relationships. We see headline after headline about abortion (which I’m aware I’m adding to here), but I wish more of those pieces could focus on the resources to help women — not only those who feel forced to choose abortion, but also those who have already had an abortion and regret it.
We often hear radical activists encouraging you to “shout your abortion,” to take pride in it. But that’s not where most women are. Until the Dobbs decision, which ended Roe, polls consistently showed that even those Americans who considered themselves pro-choice weren’t enthusiastic about abortion.
People want to know that women in difficult positions have options. And I do, too. I would just prefer that those options not include ending the life of an innocent unborn child. A New Year’s prayer of mine is that those of us who disagree on abortion can nevertheless come together to make sure that women — many of them still girls who were robbed of their innocence all too early — don’t feel as though abortion is their only choice.
Adoption is and should be considered a noble option. And yet there’s a lot of pushback about that, too, especially after Dobbs. Women shouldn’t have to be having babies to provide for couples struggling with infertility, some say. I agree. If we are raising the possibility of adoption from a woman who is already pregnant, however, we are discussing not ending a life but generously letting that life live and be loved by a couple who wants to — with all their hearts — love her. There is no question that birth mothers are extraordinarily self-sacrificial. They are heroines. To courageously continue a pregnancy and let your child be raised by another mother, in another family, should be honored as the beautiful choice it is when a birth mother doesn’t feel equipped to parent that child. We — everyone in her life — should also make sure that is also a choice. It’s painful, and must not be coerced.
There are so many terrifying news stories about women with cancer or those having suffered a miscarriage somehow having their treatments confused with abortion and not getting the care that they require and deserve. I suspect some of this has to do with overly cautious lawyers’ pressuring of doctors. As for the mainstream pro-life movement, our whole point all these decades has been that there are two patients who need to be cared for in a pregnancy, both of whom should be loved and treated as patients. Complicated situations abound, to be sure. If a doctor does not intend to kill the baby while caring for a mother with sepsis, for example, but the baby nevertheless dies, then that is not abortion.
We all lived through a pandemic during which we were told to “follow the science.” Yet when it comes to mainstream abortion, we certainly do not do that. Perhaps your daughter sent you the latest sonogram of your grandchild by email. Maybe she and her husband have a printout on their refrigerator. This technology is nothing new, and quite clear. When someone who is pro-life tries to advocate for the voiceless unborn, it is because of that obviously developing life, not because we want to insist that women be birthing vessels.
If you’ve ever spent time outside an abortion clinic, you will see too many girls going in for and coming out after abortions — some of them surgical, some of them already in progress via pills. Indeed, most abortions in America today happen by pills. That’s why a longtime prominent pro-life advocate has been predicting for years that the abortion clinic will become a relic — because your local drug store or dorm-room dispensary could easily take its place.
Unplanned was a movie released a few years ago about a Planned Parenthood director who left the industry. It was rated R, because of blood — primarily blood shown during a chemical-abortion scene in a bathroom. That reality is cruelty to women. And a prompt for all of our consciences.
There are other areas where people on opposite sides of the abortion issue can meet. We need to do better for families and single moms after children are born. We also need to insist that children not languish in foster care. For now, as one year ends and another begins, I want to again apologize that all of this gets so viciously debated in a polarized media environment rather than be treated as what it should be (and often is): a neighbor-to-neighbor story of love and support.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.