The House Judiciary Committee is investigating multiple felonies at Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion chain. Among the witnesses called were Gianna Jessen and Melissa Ohden, two women who have had some first hand experience with the abortion industry.
It tried to kill them.
Both Jessen and Ohden were delivered during botched abortions. While the circumstances of their births might have been unusual (although not exactly rare), the fact that they’re women and leaders in the pro-life movement definitely isn’t. Women are at the forefront of the pro-life cause, and polls show that many women favor pro-life legislation, sometimes in greater numbers than men.
You wouldn’t know it from listening to pro-abortion activists and politicians, however. They’ve tried to make protecting the abortion industry synonymous with defending women, and they’re quick to lash out whenever that industry is challenged. There’s a few problems with their narrative, of course. The most glaring? Women are often the ones they’re facing off against.
That might be why a Texas-based organization is suggesting a new strategy: talk about how men can benefit from abortion. Yup, it’s come to this.
In March, Andrea Grimes of RH Reality Check interviewed Amy Hagstrom Miller and Amanda Williams. They’re the founders of Shift, a nonprofit “seeking to strategically shift the stigma around abortion in our culture.” How are they going to do that? Well, here’s one idea:
Should we have a campaign where white men talk about how they benefitted from abortion? It sort of makes you throw up in your mouth a little bit, but maybe actually people listen to them. Would that work? I don’t know. Like, “I got to go to law school because my girlfriend in college had an abortion.” Like, holy sh**! Because it’s true.
Yes, there are some men who benefit from abortion, like Christian McQueen. He’s an author for the site Return of Kings, and in 2013 he released “The 10 Slut Commandments.” According to Mr. Queen, these instructions are “time-tested and designed to protect you, get you tons of a** and keep you from falling for a slut.” They include such gems as “a slut is a slut because she has low self-esteem” and “sluts are there for a man’s enjoyment and betterment.”
But as McQueen admits, there’s a major risk that comes with learning to “exploit” the women in your life. After all, it’s possible you’ll “get a slut pregnant” and end up having to “support a child and her slutty mother.” To avoid this scenario, your best option is to “convince her to have an abortion.”
If you’re looking for ideas on how to do that, you don’t need to go far. One of Mr. McQueen’s fellow writers at Return of Kings offers this bit of guidance:
When that doesn’t work, some men resort to blackmail and financial coercion. Others just use physical violence. Joseph Minerd did; he murdered his pregnant girlfriend with a homemade bomb for refusing his demands for an abortion (her three year-old daughter died, too). Women have also been shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, and smothered for the same reason. That might be why some studies suggest that over half of women who abort feel pressured to do so.
A coerced abortion isn’t just a way to avoid child support payments; it can also help a man stay out of jail. Gary Cross understood that, which is why he took his thirteen year-old stepdaughter to Planned Parenthood after getting her pregnant.
While staff there didn’t tell authorities that she was well below the age of consent, they did refer her for an abortion. With the evidence gone, Cross went back to raping her. He isn’t the only one to benefit from “abortion on demand and without apology”– these 50 other sexual predators did as well.
Live Action’s own investigations have turned up multiple PP clinics in several states which were willing to cover-up the sexual abuse of minors, so Cross’s crime isn’t unusual.
It’s not only amateur abusers who get help from the abortion industry; professionals do, too. When testifying before Texas’ Joint Interim Committee to Study Human Trafficking, Dallas Department of Public Safety officer Jeff Williams pointed out that traffickers frequently use abortion to keep their victims working.
You can hear one of them talk about what that’s like. The video below was produced by the anti-trafficking group A21 Campaign, and it features a trafficking survivor named Nicole. One of the things she recounts is being forced into two abortions by her pimp, an experience she describes as “the hardest”:
It’s easy to find examples of men benefiting from abortion. And it’s true that many of these stories could help to shift stigma, just not in the direction Miller and Williams want it to go. But if the thought of traffickers, child rapists and abusers getting help from abortionists doesn’t give you warm thoughts, then here’s something else to consider: they’re also getting it from you.
Every year, over half a billion of your tax dollars go to Planned Parenthood. That’s despite evidence the group is involved in organ sales, infanticide, and concealing sexual abuse. While pro-lifers want those funds redirected to the more than 9,000 community health centers nationwide, they were blocked last month by Senate Democrats and the Obama White House.
In the meantime, Amy Hagstrom Miller and Amanda Williams will continue fighting on behalf of the abortion industry. They believe that building “a frame where we can talk about how men benefit from abortion” will help it to be seen as an “empowering experience” and ultimately curb “abortion stigma.”
Yeah… good luck with that.
