Over the last week, Josie Cunningham has received plenty of attention for saying that she would abort her baby in order to increase her chances of starring in a TV show.
An abortion will further my career. This time next year I won’t have a baby. Instead, I’ll be famous, driving a bright pink Range Rover and buying a big house. Nothing will get in my way.
As Cassy Fiano reported for Live Action News, the TV show Cunningham hoped to star in – Big Brother – spoke out, saying that they would not choose Cunningham, even if she did have an abortion. In fact, according to the executives, aborting her child would decrease her chances of being on the show even further.
How can we work with her — or pay her — if she admits having an abortion to achieve that?
But now, Josie Cunningham is speaking again. And she’s entirely reversed course. In an incredible turn of events, Cunningham has decided to keep her child. U.K.’s Mirror reports what happened when the young mother felt her baby kicking:
[H]er unborn child had other ideas. Today Josie, 23, reveals how it literally kick-started doubts that she was doing the wrong thing – and made her flee in tears moments before signing in for her abortion at a private clinic.
“I just couldn’t do it,” sobbed young mum Josie. “I really thought I would be able to but I couldn’t. I’d felt the baby kick for the first time 24 hours earlier and I couldn’t get that feeling out of my head.
“I’d forgotten what the feeling was like. It was magical. It was like the baby was telling me not to go through with it.
“I was in the taxi driving to the clinic and felt physically sick. I was shaking. When the driver told me we were a minute away I burst into tears. I wanted to throw myself out of the moving car to get away. I had my hands on my bump and I had the strongest feeling I couldn’t let anyone take my baby away.”
Over the last several days – since she announced her decision to have an abortion – Cunningham has been contacted by many people. Some have urged her to reconsider; others have shared their anger and disgust with her. And while aborting a baby to enhance a career is indeed a terrible tragedy, there is no cause for wishing death or violence on a woman who plans to abort her baby. Calm, truth-filled statements should be used instead.
Thankfully, despite her admitted desire to ignore what some people were telling her, Cunningham decided to watch online videos of abortions before she went in for her own. She explains:
“I’d had so many angry tweets from people telling me to look at pictures of foetuses at 18 or 19 weeks and to understand what I was doing.
“I was so stubborn I just ignored them. But as I lay awake the night before the appointment, I cracked. I felt the baby kicking again and I couldn’t stop myself from looking on my phone. What I saw horrified me.
“They looked like fully formed babies and I read there have been 66 cases where aborted foetuses have come out alive because their mothers left the decision so late. I lay in bed and sobbed. Doubts crept in.”
Josie Cunningham’s story of reversal illustrates the power of truthful facts and education on abortion. Women have the right to know what “abortion” really is – not a nebulous, clean word, but instead, a cruel destruction of real human life. And women ought to seek out the facts for themselves – as Cunningham did.
Pro-lifers everywhere ought to work to help people like Cunningham take one step farther and realize that every baby at every stage of life deserves to live. At each stage of human life, we are equally and fully human and deserving of a chance at life.
Cunningham saw – and powerfully felt – the humanity of her own baby. Yet babies at 14 weeks, 12 weeks, eight weeks, and two weeks are just as human. It is more difficult to see them, and nearly impossible to feel them, but they are the same unique children at their earliest moments that they will be at 24 weeks, on their fifth birthdays, and when they drive away to college.
Humans are humans – at every stage. And at every stage, each of us deserves an equal right to life.
