Most Americans aren’t fond of abortion. They may support keeping it legal under limited circumstances, but they don’t like it. Recent polls found that a majority of Americans believe that abortion is morally wrong, and they support restrictions on abortion as well — waiting periods, parental notifications, gestational limits, etc.
Don’t tell that to the pro-abortion extremists out there, though. They continually insist that all women just love abortion, with the latest example coming from former Emily’s List staffer Janet Harris, who complains that abortion advocates need to stop calling abortion a difficult decision.
Planned Parenthood calls abortion “a difficult decision” in many of its consent forms and fact sheets. When NARAL launched a film on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade in 2013, the president of the pro-choice organization called abortion “a difficult decision” women and couples face.
Lawmakers use the adjective, too. “It was a difficult, difficult decision, but it was the right one,” Nevada Assemblywoman Lucy Flores said last month in defending her choice to have an abortion at age 16. In 2005, then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton described the decision to have an abortion as “one of the most fundamental, difficult and soul-searching decisions a woman and a family can make” and “often the most difficult [decision] that a woman will ever make.”
However, when the pro-choice community frames abortion as a difficult decision, it implies that women need help deciding, which opens the door to paternalistic and demeaning “informed consent” laws. It also stigmatizes abortion and the women who need it.
Often, abortion isn’t a difficult decision. In my case, it sure wasn’t.
…2012 study published in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health found that the vast majority of women seeking an abortion — 87 percent — had high confidence in their decisions.
Well, if having an abortion was an easy-as-pie decision for Harris, then surely it must be for all women, right? Interestingly, it turns out that the study Harris cited — the one that found 87% of women had high confidence in their decision — isn’t exactly the proof Harris makes it out to be. That study was conducted at ONE abortion clinic. It’s hardly a referendum. Considering over 60% of Americans find abortion to be morally wrong, then it’s likely that at least some of those people struggle with the decision to kill their unborn child.
Harris says herself that no woman wants to have an abortion. Why do so many pro-abortion extremists continue to insist that it isn’t a difficult decision then?
The science of embryology is settled, women who have abortions are more likely to suffer mental health problems, and be at higher risk for suicide, pre-term birth, and breast cancer. Abortion is the taking of a human life, that carries with it a number of risks.
Of course it’s a difficult decision — it’s not an easy thing, to decide to kill your own child. Maybe for extremists like Harris it’s not a big deal, but most people aren’t as cold and unfeeling as Harris and her radical peers.
