Hit-and-Run Heroism: intrepid feminist lectures pro-life teens on “reality” of “choice”

One of pro-aborts’ most insufferable qualities is their tendency to write odes to their own heroism, play-acting as ragtag underdogs risking it all to protect the pure, immeasurable goodness of “choice” against the awesome might of wild-eyed tyranny.

Today’s bizarro-world reenactment of past moral crusades comes from Michelle Kinsey Bruns, a “feminist activist” who specializes in “fight[ing] clinic harassment and other barriers to” having one’s offspring bumped off. At Feministing, she recounts how she bravely stood up to the most fearsome of adversaries: a train car full of high-school kids heading home from the March for Life (or, as she oh-so-cleverly puts it, the “March for Uterine Conscription”).

You see, our hero knew all too well that her foes weren’t “as well-informed as some of them think,” but were in fact “naïve” and “puffed up on privilege,” because she too came from the anti-intellectual, dissent-stifling doldrums of Catholic school (I have a hard time believing that Catholic education is quite so propagandistic with numbers like this, but I digress).

So, when she identified a crowd of (white, because apparently that’s important for her to note) teens with Catholic school sweaters and pro-life signs waiting to depart from Washington Union Station, Michelle of Arc just had to take the opportunity to share with them the pro-choice insight they were so sorely lacking:

“1 in 3 women in this country has an abortion. Sixty-one percent of them are already mothers. They all do it citing the difficult circumstances of their lives, and the priority of the families they already have.

“I had an abortion when I was eighteen. I had been an abused child; I had just gotten out of a place where I often went to school with two black eyes. And that abortion saved my life—”

My voice started to shake with adrenaline and nerves.

“—in the sense that I was able to take it back and become successful the way I am today. The rest of my family’s lives are still very poor, and very tough, and I love them dearly but I wish that they had had more options for themselves.” […]

“I want you to think as you grow up and into adulthood about putting this passion that you have for this cause into making healthcare available for everybody; into making, for example, executions illegal if you are pro-life. Think about the inequities that force women to say say, ‘I want this pregnancy but I cannot raise a child.’”

Sure enough, Bruns’ words left the ignorant, sheltered little Catholics bewildered and speechless, just as she expec-

Seconds later, the conductor announced the Alexandria stop. I walked back to the vestibule, picked up the bag I’d left there, and stepped off the train.

Hold on. The whole point of this stunt was that these kids were simply operating on brainwashing and lacked the enlightening experiences of their liberal betters, yet the author never actually tests her theory? She leaves before her targets—who, mind you, are mere passengers headed home after a busy, tiring trip—even have a chance to respond? We’re supposed to take it on faith that they would have fit her stereotypes? (Yes, the train’s imminent departure was beyond Bruns’s control. But that only underscores the ridiculousness of using this particular setting for a meaningful example.)

Had this not been a rhetorical hit-and-run, odds are Bruns would have been unpleasantly surprised at the teens’ actual command of the subject. Maybe they would have shared the personal experiences of those among them or loved ones who faced their own unwanted pregnancies and found a better way. Maybe they would have enlightened her about everything pro-lifers do to help such women. Maybe they would have discussed the agony and coercion baked into that one-in-three statistic. Maybe they would have schooled her on the tacit aid she gives all the harm that Planned Parenthood inflicts on women. Maybe some of them would’ve even been up on the various flaws in the Turnaway study Bruns’s article later cites.

Most importantly, they definitely would have called out the way Bruns’s entire speech simply ignored the messy question of whom her abortion destroyed: the life she ended, the soul she assumed dominion over, the future she took away, the pain she may have inflicted (Bruns doesn’t specify when in her pregnancy she aborted)…in short, the son or daughter she’ll never know, because she abandoned him or her.

Even in their brief exchange, rest assured that the teens saw her “justifying my life” spiel for the comforting lie it was, and however much they have yet to learn, they know the difference between justice and emotionalism. It would be nice if pro-aborts would stick to picking on opponents their own size, but thankfully, pro-life Davids are more than a match for Goliath.