Author claims women abort because they “respect motherhood”

Pro-abortion efforts to advance philosophical rationales for their position or deceive people about abortion facts are a relatively garden-variety form of shameful: people manipulating abstractions and impersonal information to get what they want (be it for ideological, political, or financial reasons).

The real creepiness comes when they take pro-abortion lessons from profound personal experiences that should have shown them the exact opposite message.

At Rewire (formerly RH Reality Check), Maureen Shaw tells readers how “becoming a mother made me even more pro-choice.” Have your barf bags ready before reading further.

Conservatives and conventional wisdom have told us that it’s only rash teenagers getting abortions.

Shaw goes on and on about this, even citing statistics showing that teens “account for less than one-fifth of all abortions.” But…when has anyone ever claimed most abortion-seekers are minors, or Shaw’s related straw-man that most abortion-seekers don’t already have kids?

This is part of what makes productive dialogue between the two sides so difficult: pro-aborts are constantly taking from our words and actions things that just aren’t there—in Shaw’s case, while sneering that “anti-choice activists and politicians don’t seem to care about the facts (or maybe facts are just difficult to read from their high horses).” Projection, Maureen. Read up on it.

This supposition is laden with baseless judgments: that those who seek abortion care are selfish; that they do so because having a child would cramp their depraved lifestyles (obviously the “worst” reason to terminate a pregnancy)[.]

Merriam-Webster defines selfishness as disregarding others in pursuit of one’s own interests. More than 70% of women who get abortions say they decided babies were too expensive and would change their lives too much. So of course most abortions (at least, among those that know they’re killing a living child) are selfish.

They insist on perpetuating the impulsive abortion patient trope, infantilizing women in the process. This is perhaps most evident in pushes for anti-choice legislation requiring waiting periods, counseling, and forced ultrasounds for people seeking abortions—as if they can’t or won’t make informed decisions.

Or we support those laws to counteract the abortion industry’s pervasive misinformation campaign on the subject, which one need not be “infantilized” to be deceived by. And it’s preposterous to claim accounting for the impulsiveness of some is calling everyone impulsive. I think it’s obvious that I should slow down when driving in a school zone, but it’s obviously not an insult that there are signs telling me to anyway.

Knowing now what it entails to be a mom—from pregnancy, labor, and delivery to meeting the endless demands of other human beings—I believe even more fiercely in abortion on demand and without apology. (And yes, you can be pro-choice and a parent; just read Pregnant, Parenting, and Pro-Choice for a smattering of stories). Everyone deserves to enter parenthood willingly, and every child deserves a parent who is willing to bear the responsibilities of this lifelong commitment. Children should be wanted and cherished, not forced into this world as punishment for their parents engaging in sex.

From there Shaw lays it on even thicker: “women and girls have abortions precisely because they respect children and motherhood” (emphasis added) and have even “shown the institution of motherhood” respect by aborting.

Hey, I told you you’d need barf bags.

Nobody’s denying the difficulties of pregnancy and parenthood, but to suggest those are the only takeaways from the experience—after you yourself describe it as bringing “lives” into the world—is frightening.

Seeing her children’s humanity on ultrasounds, feeling them kick, following their health as they developed, and giving birth to them as beautiful babies who clearly just didn’t become fully formed the day before…none of this made any contrary impressions on her? None of it is worth mentioning? She feels no obligation to explain how a mother can totally discount the life and humanity of children after witnessing it firsthand?

Of course children deserve “parent[s] who [are] willing to bear the responsibilities of this lifelong commitment,” but that’s an argument for giving them that through safe-haven adoption laws and reforms to our adoption system, not for depriving them of any chance of the family they deserve.

Of course children “should be wanted and cherished,” but that’s not an argument for hurting them even worse because you don’t want or cherish them.

Of course children shouldn’t be “forced into this world,” but that’s why you shouldn’t force them into the world in the first place by recklessly conceiving them, not a justification for forcing them out of the world once they’re already here.

Oh, and because the irony wasn’t already thick enough, this horrifying exercise was brought to you by an author with a master’s degree in human rights.

Sickening though it may be, this sort of thing may ultimately be pro-lifers’ most potent weapon in turning America irrevocably against abortion: dragging the culture of death’s most perverse, inhumane, and counter-intuitive thinking into the light for all to see.