By Dave Andrusko
As I have explained many times, often the most revealing stories come courtesy of our faithful readers. This post comes from the Herald Sun (Austrialia). It’s headlined, “No shame in aborting unborn life” and is written by Susie O’Brien.
Let’s be clear. The first objective of pro-lifers is not “shaming” anyone, but rather saving the lives of unborn babies and the future psychological, emotional, and spiritual health of women facing crisis pregnancies.
Where we part company (actually we part company even earlier, but…)with people like Ms. O’Brien is over the self-serving and lethal mistake-erasing notion that it is better to be the “good” mother of a dead baby than a “bad” mother of a living baby.
That is, not only shouldn’t women be ashamed of their abortions, they ought to take a certain kind of pride, according to O’Brien. They weighed their situation, check-listed their parental skills, evaluated the totality of their environment and chose…what they chose.
Thus she can conclude, “Yes, it is a big, important, life-changing event that should be taken seriously” (referring to abortion), “but let’s get off the guilt-trip,” she advises. And here’s how Ms. O’Brien glides past the “guilt-trip”:
“Women abort potential babies because they would prefer not to be a mother at all, rather than be an inadequate parent. It’s not that they don’t care about the unborn child, it’s because they care so much.”
As she writes a few paragraphs later
“It might sound counter-intuitive, but it actually makes perfect sense.”
O’Brien cites a study from a research team led by Dr Maggie Kirkman from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Women’s Health and Society. What follows below is a representative of “a group of 60 Victorian women aged 16 to 38 who rang a Royal Women’s Hospital pregnancy advice service for help about their reasons for considering an abortion.”
“One woman interviewed, Abigail, didn’t realise she was pregnant until this time, and decided to have an abortion because she had been drinking heavily and feared for the foetus’s health. ‘You know, you don’t just have a child because you can,’ she told researchers.”
Think about that for a second. It’s almost as if she is trying to tell herself she wasn’t really pregnant in the first place—that becoming a mother was some future event the path down which she had not taken the first (or multiple) steps.
I understand that when we violate values written on our hearts we must find rationalizations. Just, please, don’t tell me that a baby torn limb from limb is “better off.”
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