Erin Gloria Ryan, writer for Jezebel, believes that if there’s a perfect age to give birth, there must be a perfect age to have an abortion. She makes a half-joking but totally serious attempt to back up this belief while making it clear that she “take[s] issue with abortion being equivocated with actual murder.”
Jezebel and VH1 writer Erin Gloria Ryan via Facebook.
To Ryan, unborn children aren’t people (although I, for the life of me, can’t figure out what else they would be), and therefore, to stop their beating hearts is not murder. So how did she reach the conclusion that age 25 is the age at which a woman should have an abortion? With a bit of financial and emotional age-by-age comparison.
Her choice of age 25 surprised me a bit. I mean, what about those teenagers? She says herself that if you’re under 18, you “ aren’t … equipped to be mothers.” (I wonder why she left out the fathers.) She points to well-known teen moms like Bristol Palin and Justin Bieber’s mother as examples of women who have given birth as teenagers and therefore “experienced massive hardship.” I don’t see either of those women struggling; do you? Plus there are plenty of examples of successful women who were teenage moms. There’s Tamika Newhouse, CEO of Delphine Publications. And there’s Cathy Hughes, CEO of Radio One and the first African-American woman to head a publicly traded company. Plus, our own president is the child of a teenage mom. So really, is teenage motherhood an automatic setup to a “lasting lifef***,” as Ryan writes? No. Plus, if she’s so sure teenagers are not emotionally equipped to become parents, are they really emotionally equipped enough to be having sex?
As for ages 18-23, having an abortion will likely mean using your parents’ insurance, which will mean that your parents will find out about your abortion. To Ryan, this is a big disadvantage, although I’m not sure why, because if you believe that abortion is a wonderful, constitutional right, then why would your parents be anything other than supportive of you stopping the heartbeat and therefore life of their grandchild? And why would you feel the need to hide your abortion if you honestly believe there’s nothing wrong with it and no shame attached to it?
If you’re unexpectedly pregnant between the ages of 27 and 30, Ryan says it is probably wiser to keep the baby because:
Who knows when you’ll find another guy willing to repeatedly f*** your aging-out-of-online-dating carcass[?]
Is this supposed to be funny? Ryan’s implying that women are just sex toys to men and that in order to have a child in your late 20s, you’d have to wrangle up some guy to trick into getting you pregnant. So much for women being strong, independent, smart, and worth more than their bra size.
As for that perfect age to have an abortion, 25, Ryan says that women are more likely to be financially stable at this age and still very fertile and therefore don’t have much to lose by having an abortion. She says that since the average age of marriage is now 27, women should be all set to abort any children at age 25 because in the next two years they will likely find a life partner and still have time to get pregnant. So it’s okay to toss this baby aside. Of course, she notes, “it’s more emotional to abort when you know the guy’s last name.” So, women, Ryan’s advice is to engage only in casual sex with strangers until you’re ready to be married. Only then, she believes, should you attempt a real relationship with a man; otherwise, you risk letting any baby you create live, and that would ruin your life.
To see actual abortion video, click on the above image.
