Women Need Good Men

A doctor in Ohio is alleged to have force-fed his girlfriend abortion pills. She was pregnant, and he was desperate. This is the reality today. There are no sufficient regulations to protect women against such abuse.

In the U.S. today, you can get a prescription for abortion through telehealth — and if your state prohibits abortion, a doctor in a state where it is legal can put them in the mail for you. Even a man can get abortion pills on behalf of someone else. Please tell me that no one is delusional enough to think that this is really women’s health care.

We can recognize that this is wrong. It’s wrong to let women be victimized by forced abortions made possible by telehealth, in a society that insists on the acceptability of abortion. That’s not what most women want when they’re pregnant. They want to care for their child. They want to love. They want to have the freedom to love.

And yet, here we are. The aforementioned doctor, as I write, has not been arrested. The State Medical Board of Ohio found “clear and convincing evidence” of his actions, and it has suspended his medical license. He can no longer practice, but he has not been charged with a crime. How can that be?

I think a lot about the Bleecker Street Planned Parenthood clinic in New York because I’ve spent a lot of time outside of it — and it has finally closed. It was originally named after Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. It was the flagship abortion clinic in New York. I witnessed so much of the pain of teenagers and young women, girls, who were going in for abortions. They were sad. They were mad. It looked as though life had been sucked out of them. Sometimes, after they exited the clinic, all they could do was cry. Sometimes, I was so naïve. I wanted to share with them post-abortion healing materials. They were not there yet. I don’t know when someone might get there. I know from women who have had abortions that it takes so long, and it is so frightening, to get to the point where you appreciate that you are loved enough by strangers to go to them and say, “I need healing; I love the child I aborted.”

I think about this woman who was force-fed abortion pills, something that we might see happening more often given the accessibility of abortion pills and the absence of adequate regulation. Not that regulation would help completely prevent such situations. Whatever you think about abortion in general, the evil of widely and easily available abortion pills must stop now. The fact of the matter is that so long as we think that abortion is health care, women are going to suffer. Women are suffering. Babies are dying, and we pretend otherwise. We pretend that this is about political loyalties. We pretend that women need abortion. We don’t need abortion.

We need a culture that insists on supporting women and families. It’s important, it’s critical, and, yes, it’s expensive and it’s challenging. But family is the most important thing there is. After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, after all we’ve experienced and endured in politics over the past couple of years, we should recognize that the most important thing is family. Last week, we marked the feast day of Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini. She came to New York from Italy and sacrificed more than we probably will ever appreciate because she understood that children and families need love and sacrifice.

There will always be outliers, such as that Ohio doctor. But there are also so many men — most men, in fact — who want to protect women, who want to love women, who want to support women, and we must rally around them. That’s what we need to celebrate. That’s what we need to appreciate. And we need to tell young men that we need more of them, because that’s how families flourish. That’s how civilizations succeed.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.