According to certain activists, women need abortion. They need it so they can go to college or keep their jobs. They need abortion to be equal to men. They need it to be successful or healthy or happy. To hear them tell it, abortion saves women. But the reality is, abortion is a sign of just how much our society fails women.
Choice?
Abortion activists like to call themselves “pro-choice,” but far too often, women are not freely making the choice of abortion. Women facing unplanned pregnancies, even under the best circumstances, are scared. They are vulnerable, desperate, and often alone; they don’t think they have a choice.
For many women in school, for example, support and resources for parenting on campus just aren’t there. But abortion is made available — some colleges are even making it a requirement for it to be available on-campus. Some organizations are working to change that, but by and large, women who are students are often led to believe that their choice is to drop out of school or have an abortion. That’s just one example; how many other women seek it because they are battling poverty, drug or alcohol abuse, an unsupportive employer, or a lack of resources and support? Is a choice made in fear truly a choice?
READ: Amazing professor shows support for women, mothers on college campus
On top of that, many women are coerced — a scenario much more common than the abortion industry would have us believe. These are the women who are already facing domestic abuse or family turmoil. They are threatened with homelessness or violence if they refuse to abort. Abortion does not help these women, nor does it give them any semblance of “choice.” Yet abortionists don’t help them; they collect the money, kill the preborn baby, and send the woman on her way. Even abortionists have been forced to admit that abortion does not help these women. This is not choice — but the self-professed “pro-choice” activists rarely, if ever, address these situations beyond paying shallow lip service to them. It’s more important to them that women get abortions.
An unethical industry
Women don’t just face pressure and coercion from their families. They face it from the abortion industry itself. Take, for example, Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion chain. Women facing unplanned pregnancies go to Planned Parenthood thinking they have options, but the truth is, there is only option Planned Parenthood really offers to women. Prenatal care is practically non-existent; adoption referrals are minuscule. Women who don’t want to have abortions or who are unsure end up being manipulated, lied to, and pressured to have abortions.
Women who are in true crisis don’t get treated much better. Planned Parenthood clearly views itself as being above the law, and has gone so far as to cover up child rape and sex trafficking for abortion. Abortionists, again, do not try to help these women and girls; time and time again, they have been found to have asked no questions, informed no authorities, and instead, committed the abortion and handed the victim right back to her abuser or trafficker.
Abortion doesn’t save these women; it furthers their victimization.
Abortion hurts women
In a vulnerable, desperate moment, women sometimes turn to abortion, thinking that it will be a solution to their problem. But does abortion help them, or does it just hurt them more? It comes with numerous risks, risks the industry does not tend to disclose to its victims. Those risks include multiple cancers, including breast, ovarian, liver, and cervical cancers, premature birth in future pregnancies, endometriosis, Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, and other physical complications. There are also potential psychological consequences, which can include mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicidal and self-harming behavior.
The abortion industry often claims it’s been proven that women do not regret or grieve their abortions, but this is false; many women do, over time, feel grief and regret. Many of them grieve the children they lost. A decision made in desperation has led to a lifetime of pain for many, many women.
Women deserve better
It’s a well-known fact by now that the earliest feminists were pro-life. An article published in Susan B. Anthony’s paper, The Revolution, which many believe was written by Anthony herself, makes one of the most compelling arguments against abortion — and for why we are, today, still failing women.
Guilty? Yes no matter what the motive, love of ease, or desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh! Thrice guilty is he who, for selfish gratification, heedless of her prayers, indifferent to her fate, drove her to the desperation which impels her to the crime.
Susan B. Anthony
The abortion industry has little interest in why women choose abortion, but as discussed here, it’s not a choice that women are making freely. No one grows up hoping they can get pregnant and abort their baby one day; even for people who consider themselves to be “pro-choice,” this is a terrible scenario for a woman to find herself in. Women seek abortions because they are coerced, or because they have a lack of support, a lack of resources. Societal injustices against women still exist, injustices that drive women to find themselves in a precarious situation that no one ever wants to end up in. The feminist movement has been hijacked by the pro-abortion movement, and so arguments against pregnancy discrimination have fallen by the wayside. No one needs bother with working towards getting better resources for women, better support systems for students who become pregnant, or support for low-income families. Why should anyone worry about things like that, which would be so difficult to implement, when they can just push a woman towards abortion instead?
Abortion keeps women enslaved. It disempowers them. It allows these injustices to not only persist, but to thrive. The feminist movement does not care that women deserve better anymore, even as hundreds of millions of preborn children have died and countless women have sacrificed their own bodies and hearts for what they thought would give them a better future.
We should be demanding more. We should be demanding better. Because all of us — our nation’s women, and the children that they bear — deserve more than this. Abortion isn’t helping women. It’s failing them.
