In an article published Tuesday, Fusion reporter Kristen V. Brown details her abortion, describing it as a totally joyful experience.
Brown recounts her evening with a man she met on an online dating site, which resulted in the pregnancy. She describes her pregnancy as “the horrifying conclusion to a regrettable night.” Afraid of being stuck with a baby she didn’t want, Brown chose abortion. She offered a coworker pizza and alcohol to stay with her during the hours after taking the abortion pill, to make sure she didn’t “pass out and bleed to death while curled up in pain” on her bathroom floor.
After having the abortion, Brown says her life went back to normal – even better than normal. “…[O]nce I got an abortion, suddenly, everything was fine again,” she writes.
By “fine,” what Brown means is that she was able to return to her newspaper fellowship. She had worried that a baby would wreck her career plans and her life in general. Brown describes feeling power and control as she realized her only responsibility was still to herself. “I felt awesome,” she says. “Becoming pregnant was a grief and a blackness. Getting an abortion was just a relief.”
There are several problems with Brown’s article. First, it serves to highlight some of the less-than-flattering reasoning behind the pro-choice position. Brown focuses on having “control” over her own body, while giving no acknowledgement of the other body involved in an abortion – the one killed. View Live Action’s recently released video of how the abortion pill – which Brown took – actually works:
The pro-choice position is that the mother holds the power of life and death over the baby, because the baby is completely dependent on the mother – that because the baby develops inside the woman’s body, it is a part of the woman’s body (or is treated as such). Although this view is widely held, it clearly has no substantial roots in logic, ethics, or science. Live Action News’s Calvin Freiburger dismantled this “bodily autonomy” position, saying:
Pro-aborts equate pregnancy with forced servitude, claiming a woman has no obligation to let her children develop within her because she never gave express consent for them to do so, and even if she did, she reserves the right to reassert ownership of her bodily resources and revoke the unborn baby’s right to use them. Superficially, that sounds like it could be a reasonable inference from Lockean natural law theory…until you start to think about it.
… [T]here’s no reason a general right to remove an unwanted baby from one’s womb would entail a right to have him or her intentionally killed by abortion.
… Sustaining developing offspring is the uterus’s biological function. So from a natural-law perspective, the unborn baby most certainly does have the right to his or her mother’s bodily resources.
Beyond that obvious problem, Brown further uses her story to argue against pro-life laws that protect women from the very real dangers of abortion, framing the laws as paternalistic and sexist due to their ‘targeted’ protection of women. Well, that’s a rather interesting argument, until one realizes that 100% of pregnant people are, biologically, female.
The lack of better abortion facility regulations and oversight – and the lack of willingness to shut down abortionists who have poor safety records – have led to great tragedy for women like Jennifer Morbelli, Lakisha Wilson, Karnamaya Mongar, Christin Gilbert, Tonya Reaves, and many more. Laws protecting women from abortion exist because only women can undergo abortions, not because the secret society of pro-life woman-haters seeks to control all non-males.
Brown’s story is a sad one on several levels, and it is unfortunate to see it used to argue that pregnancy is a problem, and abortion the solution.
