Remembering Roe: What 50 years of abortion propaganda did to American culture

Fifty-one years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States forced every state to legalize abortion through at least the arbitrary age of ‘viability’ for any reason, and up until birth for so-called “health” reasons. Abortion was supposed to be “legal but rare.” But through decades of propaganda, Americans were slowly convinced that what was originally marketed as a necessary evil had become a right to be celebrated.

Preborn children have been so dehumanized by euphemisms that women now joke about killing their babies. Women have become so convinced that their children are barriers to their success, that motherhood has become an inferior status in society. Women believe they cannot succeed in their education or careers without abortion. This propaganda is now frequently featured in television and film storylines (at the behest of the abortion industry, no less) continuing the onslaught of pro-abortion lies upon a new generation.

Joking about abortion

Social media has given society a glimpse into what young people think of abortion, and it’s startling. To many of them, abortion is a joke. Two young women posted a disturbing video of a trip to Planned Parenthood where one of them would be undergoing an abortion. The video showed them laughing and celebrating, and it ended with a clip of the ultrasound with a tiny baby bouncing around — presumably about to be killed.

The Daily Beast reported that it found more than a dozen clips online of women claiming to be undergoing abortions, including a woman swinging her feet from the exam table with the words “when he texts you to have a good abortion” written across the video. Women in the varying videos can be seen smiling, dancing, and lip-syncing — though some of them admittedly are not actually undergoing abortions, just joking about it.

Comedians frequently use abortion as a punchline. Michelle Wolfe joked that her abortion made her feel “powerful” — which is often how an abusive person feels when he harms a weaker person. She also once joked, “Mike Pence is also very anti-choice. He thinks abortion is murder, which, first of all, don’t knock it till you try it. And when you do try it, really knock it. You know, you got to get that baby out of there.”

Comedians Margaret Cho and Lizz Winstead likened preborn children to cancer, and two podcast hosts, Lauryn Petrie and Adrianne Kuss, sexualized abortion. “Between the two [abortions]… I’m very much like, you know what, the surgical one was pretty big, girl,” Kuss said. “I did it without the anesthesia… well, local anesthesia, I didn’t go under. I stayed awake. I wanted the whole experience of it. I’m like, ‘I want to look into your face when you’re sucking that out of my body!’”

Petrie added, “That’s f***ing kind of hot. Why is that hot?”

It’s not a joke when children are being violently killed and women are left traumatized — but advocates want you to believe it is, because it ‘normalizes’ abortion and creates future customers.

The Pro-Life Reply to: "My Body, My Choice"

A celebrated right

“My body, my choice” was one of the first examples of pro-abortion propaganda with which Americans are now deeply familiar. To push for the legalization of abortion, early advocates marketed abortion as a difficult choice, and argued that while it should be legal for women who need it, it should also be rare. They sold abortion to Americans as something that would only happen when ‘necessary’.

More than 50 years later, killing preborn children is now marketed as a celebrated right that is necessary to ensure women’s equality and equal participation in society. “My body, my choice” is now so familiar that it has even made its way into children’s media. Every successful product needs a customer, and in order to take the killing of preborn children from ‘rare’ to ‘profitable,’ America had to be convinced that women need it, and can’t have equality or a good quality of life without it.

In 2018, comedian Chelsea Handler issued a press release regarding Donald Trump’s nomination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. She said, “Let’s be crystal clear: abortion rights, and by proxy, women’s ability to be equal partners in society, is on the line in this fight.”

She was only echoing the words of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who argued, “[L]egal challenges to undue restrictions on abortion procedures do not seek to vindicate some generalized notion of privacy; rather, they center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.”

Actress Martha Plimpton has had multiple abortions, but celebrated her first one as her “best one.” She’s also sported a dress covered in the word ‘abortion.’ Abortion is now being treated as a rite of passage that every woman must go through in order to achieve success, and famous actresses like Plimpton are teaching this mentality to young fans. In her 2020 Golden Globes acceptance speech, actress Michelle Williams said she “wouldn’t have been able to do this without employing a woman’s right to choose.”

But legalized abortion hasn’t made women equal to men; instead, it gave them a power that no man has, and that no man or woman should have: the power to kill. Advocates convinced women they wanted to make an equal playing field — if men could abandon their children then women could kill their children. But that didn’t elevate women. It did the opposite.

To state that women must have abortion access to be equal to men is to imply that women are not equal without it — that because of their fertility, they are somehow “less than.” Yet all human beings are inherently equal, and women are, therefore, fundamentally equal to men… and they don’t need to kill their children to prove it.

Those who do go through with an abortions are at risk of suffering trauma, not empowerment. Women have seen their babies’ bodies and retold the horrific moment to warn other women of the truth of what they might experience.

Abortion is simply oppression redistributed — the oppression women have experienced, they now place upon the weaker, innocent human beings they helped to create.

Abortion as health care

Abortion as health care is one of the worst lies Americans have ever believed. There is no medical condition that requires doctors to kill one patient to save another. Killing a preborn child will not save a woman’s mental health; in fact, it may worsen it. And even if a woman has a medical condition or a medical emergency during pregnancy, and her pregnancy must end, the child does not have to be directly or intentionally killed by abortion for the pregnancy to end. A preterm delivery or an emergency C-section allows the pregnancy to end without the child being killed. If the child dies as an unintentional, secondary result of a medically necessary preterm birth, this is not an abortion.

Since the fall of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, abortion advocates have pushed the ‘health care’ narrative even harder. They have been feeding the media heartbreaking stories of women whom they claim were denied “medically necessary abortions” in pro-life states. Doctors trained during the reign of Roe v. Wade either seem to have been erroneously taught that abortion is a medical treatment, or they are deliberately denying women proper medical care to further the agenda of expanding abortion. In states where preborn children are now protected by pro-life laws, doctors appear to be failing to provide pregnant women with proper care, and the media is blaming these cases of potential medical neglect on pro-life laws. It’s pure propaganda — an attempt to garner compassion for abortion through emotionally charged stories.

Amanda Zurawski, for example, went into preterm labor due to an incompetent cervix. Doctors told her the amniotic sac was “bulging,” and that a miscarriage was inevitable — and then sent her home. She claimed she was denied a medically necessary abortion, but induced abortion has never been a treatment for an incompetent cervix. As Dr. Christina Francis, board member and CEO-elect of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists explained to Live Action News (emphasis added):

As an OB/GYN, I have taken care of many women with cervical insufficiency. It can be a heartbreaking situation and my heart goes out to this couple. While many details about this particular patient’s clinical situation are missing, elective abortion is not a treatment for cervical insufficiency.

Many times, if infection is ruled out, women can be treated with a stitch, called a cerclage, which is placed in her cervix to hold the unborn baby in until he or she can survive outside the mother. An attentive physician should be able to detect signs of infection early and, if present, provide the appropriate treatment –  which would be induction of labor. This treatment is not prevented by any abortion restriction in the country. 

Because the false idea that induced abortion is a medically necessary procedure has taken such a strong hold on American culture, even doctors wrongly believe that providing a woman with standard treatment — treatment that does not involve the intentional ending of a preborn child’s life — has been prohibited by pro-life laws.

Zurawski should have been offered the necessary and completely legal treatment that her specific situation required, which was not induced abortion. Instead, she was sent home to suffer, grieve a child who was still alive, and fear for her own life… only to go on to convince millions of Americans that abortion was the only solution when it wasn’t a solution at all. The abortion industry has used the tragic death of Zurawki’s baby to gain support for abortion in all trimesters, profiting from killing preborn babies at any stage for any reason.

Likewise, if a preborn child receives a prenatal diagnosis, parents are often advised to have an abortion, as was the case with Kate Cox, whose preborn child was diagnosed with Trisomy 18. Cox had health risks that she was willing to take when she thought she was pregnant with a “healthy” child, but when she learned her baby had Trisomy 18 and would have disabilities, she wanted an abortion. Cox’s story helped to convince Americans that Trisomy 18 is deadly and that Cox needed a “medically necessary” abortion. The truth is that children with Trisomy 18 are living longer lives than in past years, albeit with disabilities. Cox was not willing to carry a baby to term who would have disabilities and a potentially shortened life.

Abortion is a violent act that infringes on the right to life of innocent human beings. Claiming women have a right to kill an innocent human being (that came to exist inside the womb through no action of its own) is similar to claiming that plantation owners had a right to slaves. One person’s desire to be “free” from a responsibility they don’t want does not give that person the right to oppress or kill other innocent human beings. Slave owners dehumanized slaves; today abortion advocates dehumanize preborn babies. Pro-slavery individuals still promote slavery as a positive good; likewise, pro-abortion individuals promote abortion as a positive good. Slaves were seen by some as better off being slaves; some babies are seen as better off dead.

The killing of innocent preborn human beings before birth should make Americans very uncomfortable.

The DOJ put a pro-life grandmother in jail this Christmas for protesting the killing of preborn children. Please take 30-seconds to TELL CONGRESS: STOP THE DOJ FROM TARGETING PRO-LIFE AMERICANS.