Analysis

Pro-abortion feminists should admit that abortion is acceptable killing, argues op-ed

abortion, Ohio, aborted babies

Feminist writer Sophie Lewis has penned an op-ed for The Nation in which she announced that abortion is killing — but that this killing is still acceptable. Lewis argued that being “pro-choice” means opposing a “forced life,” and says women should be able to choose death.

“There is something infantilizing about denying the fact that embryos die when we scrape them out of the bodies of which they are a part,” she wrote. “It sentimentalizes pregnant or potentially pregnant humans as fundamentally nonviolent creatures to imply that we can’t handle the truth about what we are up to when we opt out. And it patronizes abortion-getters to insist that we are only making a health care choice, rather than (also) extinguishing a future child. In my view, recognizing that gestating manufactures a proto-person requires acknowledging that abortion kills a proto-person.”

Lewis then goes on to give examples of when humans kill, when it’s deemed “necessary,” in instances of self-defense, liberation, or — incredibly — as an act of so-called mercy. Pregnancy, to Lewis, is another example of an acceptable, necessary circumstance in which to kill.

READ: Woman devastated by abortion as a teen now shares her story to help others

“What would it mean to acknowledge that a death is involved in an abortion? Above all, it would allow for a fairer fight against the proponents of forced gestating,” she concluded, always referring to mothers as “gestators” and their children as “gestates”:

When ‘pro-life’ forces agitate against feticide on the basis that it is killing, pro-abortion feminists should be able to acknowledge, without shame, that yes, of course it is. When we withdraw from gestating, we stop the life of the product of our gestational labor. And it’s a good thing we do, too, for otherwise the world would sag under the weight of forced life.

It is a hard pill to swallow for a misogynist society, sentimentally attached to its ideology of patriarchal motherhood, but the truth is that gestators should get to decide which bodies to give form to. This choosing is our prerogative. A desire not to be pregnant is sufficient reason in and of itself to terminate a gestatee.

It’s not unusual for abortion advocates to claim that killing in abortion is acceptable. Even abortionists have admitted that they know they are killing. Planned Parenthood abortionist Lisa Harris was caught on undercover video at a National Abortion Federation conference saying, “Let’s just give them all the violence, it’s a person, it’s killing, let’s just give them all that,” adding that “we [pro-lifers and abortion providers] might actually both agree that there’s violence in here.”

Once the door is opened to killing human beings who are inconvenient and a stronger person is free to kill a more vulnerable one simply because they feel it is their right, where does it end? Does a parent have the right to kill an adult child with disabilities because they’re too much of a burden? An elderly parent? Maybe a roommate feels that the person living with them is being too disrespectful — are they now allowed to kill them?

There is no justification for taking innocent human life. While it’s at least honest to admit that abortion takes a life, there’s no real defense for it.

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