An absurd skit on Saturday featured a clown spouting pro-abortion tropes.
On this weekend’s Saturday Night Live, the show featured a bit with actress Cecily Strong portraying “Goober the Clown (who had an abortion when she was 23).” It was a truly bizarre three minutes, not one moment of which was even remotely amusing. More likely than not, its aim wasn’t to be funny but rather to promote one of the Left’s favorite messages: Getting an abortion is a normal thing to do — a great thing, actually — and women — er, I mean, clowns — who have had one shouldn’t feel alone.
Predictably, Strong’s performance got rave reviews from major media outlets, which are always on the hunt for ways to celebrate “reproductive rights” and dunk on regressive anti-choicers. Turning abortion politics into a big joke is a pretty common theme among comedians these days. But SNL’s skit did a real disservice to women, especially those who have had an abortion.
“I know I wouldn’t be a clown on TV here today if it weren’t for the abortion I had the day before my 23rd birthday,” Strong says in the skit, echoing a statement from actress Michelle Williams in her Golden Globes acceptance speech a few years back.
It’s meant to be empowering, but in reality this sentiment limits women, communicating that they can’t expect to achieve meaningful success unless they prioritize their careers over the lives of their unborn children. It also suggests that choosing to have a child, and putting one’s career on pause to focus on being a mother, is a foolish decision that will cut against future fulfillment.
“Clowns have been helping each other end their pregnancies since the caves,” Strong adds absurdly. “It’s gonna happen, so it ought to be safe, legal, and accessible.”
Those who have followed the abortion debate for the past 30 years will recognize that last comment, and the way Strong has tweaked it. Once, abortion supporters said the procedure should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Today, “rare” has been replaced with “accessible,” because to suggest that abortion should be rare implies that there’s something undesirable about it, that it might be complicated, difficult, or even lamentable.
The abortion-rights movement of 2021, on full display in SNL’s ridiculous attempt at humor, prefers to stare insolently at the camera and laugh about abortion. That off-key celebration is made possible only by ignoring that every abortion is act of violence against a vulnerable human being, an act that harms their mothers, too.
If we assume the best of the skit’s creators, perhaps they meant to help post-abortive women feel less alone, but instead they erased the stories of countless women who didn’t want to choose abortion. All too often, women who have had an abortion felt that they had no choice because of financial difficulties, pressure from family, or lack of support from the child’s father. The skit likewise whitewashes the reality that some women are coerced into abortion, whether by literal force or by threats of abandonment. Surely abortions chosen in such circumstances aren’t something to normalize or celebrate.
But women who had an abortion and don’t feel like celebrating — whether because they wish they’d had another option or because they suffer from guilt or other negative psychological outcomes after the fact — might as well not exist for the purposes of the modern abortion-advocacy movement, which, at best, ignores them or, at worst, assures them that their feelings are merely the result of cultural stigma.
In their haste to mock those who would protect the unborn and their mothers, SNL’s comedians have made light of a tragic choice no woman should feel she has to make.