Shonda Rhimes’ musings on keeping Dad in the dark about aborting his kids weren’t the only bit of pseudo-wisdom Hollywood’s contributed to the abortion debate in recent days. The Huffington Post interviewed Chicago PD star Sophia Bush, who had some sage words for pro-lifers: just, like, give it a rest already…
I feel like if they can keep us talking about, you know, a woman’s place, a woman’s reproductive rights and all of these things that are ‘hot-button’ issues because they make people emotional […]
Hold on. When exactly was the last time you heard anyone lecturing anyone else about “a woman’s place” (i.e., in the home or the kitchen)? This is one of those straw-men that persist simply because pro-aborts endlessly wail about abortion laws being a tool to keep women down, despite there being no actual evidence for it. Hint: if women manage so many pro-life organizations, and pro-lifers love pro-life elected officials like Diane Black and businesswomen like Carly Fiorina, those are probably pretty good signs that pro-lifers don’t have a problem with women being independent or having jobs.
[…] they can actually just, you know, defer us, and then we’re not having the conversations we need to have about what our policy looks like, about what our financial situation looks like, about our education system, about our health care, about all of these things that actually matter in this country.
“Things that actually matter.” Unlike, y’know, children’s lives.
The most immediate offense in these words is of course the dismissal of abortion’s victims. In any society that calls itself humane, the avoidable death of even one child of course matters…and abortion has claimed more than 57 million. More deaths than the Americans lost in every war in our history, more than eight times the victims of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, and more than sixteen-thousand times the number of blacks the Ku Klux Klan murdered throughout its entire existence.
To claim such a massive bloodbath happening right under our noses doesn’t matter—while self-righteously lecturing the rest of us on not recognizing which #LivesMatter, no less—makes a mockery of the very concept of compassion.
Second, abortion certainly matters to the women whose lives it has devastated—the procedure’s very real risks of infertility, preterm births, breast cancer, perforated uteri, and severe mental and emotional suffering; the industry’s hysterical refusal to accept basic medical standards despite its widespread history of health and safety violations; the industry’s active promotion of underage sexual promiscuity, including its support for the “right” to infect sex partners with HIV without their knowledge; the industry’s willingness to let teen sexual abuse go unreported; abortion’s usefulness to real misogynists who want to use women for sex then abandon them… does any of that sound like it’s worth our attention?
Third, it’s worth pointing out that abortion also has direct and indirect effects on the very things Ms. Bush claims “actually matter.” Live Action’s Mitch Behna found that the US birth rate isn’t quite meeting replacement level and that without the percentage of the population taken by abortion, Medicare and Social Security are short $11 billion and $47 million, respectively. Economist John Lott has demonstrated that legalizing abortion likely led to an increase in violent crime. Forbes contributor Bill Flax shows that abortion has increased out-of-wedlock births. Professor Michael New has linked abortion’s legalization to an increase in child abuse.
All of these things feed social ills such as educational failure, poverty, dependence, sexually transmitted diseases, and social alienation—leading to a less free, less safe, less prosperous, less stable, and less happy culture.
They’re like, ‘Oh, if we can just make them scream on either side about abortion, they won’t talk about anything else.’ And it’s like, how about we just move on and, and we get to, like, the issues that weren’t decided by the Supreme Court 40 years ago.
Sorry, but “it’s time to shut up because some unelected judges told us to in a fallacious decree a long time ago” isn’t how things work in a self-governing republic of three coequal branches. Besides, there’s no statute of limitations on justice—it took 89 years after our founding for the United States to end slavery, and 144 years to guarantee women’s right to vote. After ending slavery, it took another 99 years to guarantee equal protection of blacks’ civil rights. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on for half a century without resolution.
So while it may stump the occasional celebrity, we will continue to engage the country on abortion, because it does matter—for the babies, for their mothers, and for the rest of the country that has been altered in innumerable ways by their deaths.
