In a recent tweet, the Virginia chapter of the ACLU repeated several times, in all-caps — a favored meme style of progressive Twitter accounts — “BANNING ABORTION IS FORCING PREGNANCY.”
Either the social-media intern running the page has little idea how babies come into being or he has, like many abortion supporters before him, decided to feign ignorance on the matter for the sake of defending abortion.
In a piece last month, I considered the “forced pregnancy” and “forced birth” smears at length, as this is a relatively new attack from the abortion-rights movement. For a long time, one of the most common arguments for abortion has been that the unborn child’s location inside his mother renders him something akin to her property; the silly slogan “my body, my choice” finds its origins in this silly premise.
But lately, the argument has been modified. Rather than focus on the child’s lack of having yet been born, abortion proponents have begun to argue that prohibiting abortion is the same thing as forcing women to be pregnant, to give birth, or to be a mother.
It isn’t just lowly ACLU Twitter gurus making this claim; it appeared at the Supreme Court last month, parroted by both attorneys representing the pro-abortion side in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
“For a state to take control of a woman’s body and demand that she go through pregnancy and childbirth, with all the physical risks and life-altering consequences that brings, is a fundamental deprivation of her liberty,” Julie Rikelman, attorney for Jackson Women’s Health, asserted in her opening statement.
But for those of us willing to acknowledge where babies come from, this argument falls flat. Laws against abortion don’t force women to be pregnant; they require parents who conceived a child after engaging in the act by which children are conceived not to enact lethal violence as a means of ending pregnancy or avoiding parenthood. Forbidding parents to kill their children is not the same thing as forcing them to be parents; they already are parents, in nearly every case because of an act they freely chose. It isn’t an act of “force” to require them to act like parents rather than kill their child because they’d prefer to pretend it never existed.