This week, Time posted an article about a 13-year-old Mississippi girl who recently became a mother. Last fall, the teen girl, to whom Time refers by the pseudonym of “Ashley,” was reportedly making TikToks of herself dancing on her front lawn when a stranger is said to have grabbed her, pulled her around to the side of the house, and raped her. Without ever saying it directly, Time implies that Ashley should have had an abortion, for a variety of reasons.
One implied reason Time seems to argue that Ashley should have had her preborn child killed is because she is financially poor and Black. About the delta region of Mississippi where Ashley lives, Time writes:
The people who live in the Delta are overwhelmingly Black. The poverty rate is high. The region is an epicenter of America’s ongoing Black maternal-health crisis. Mississippi has the second-highest maternal-mortality rate in the country, with 43 deaths per 100,00 live births, and the Delta has among the worst maternal-healthcare outcomes in the state. Black women in Mississippi are four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as white women.
What Time states about the Black maternal mortality rate in Mississippi is true. But Ashley herself did not experience any complications with her pregnancy or birth, and her baby is healthy.
Death – for either mother or child – was neither an imminent threat nor a necessary “solution.”
And killing the sufferer is never the solution to suffering. It makes little sense to say that because healthcare is lacking for impoverished Black women, we should kill their children. Such an idea smacks of racism and classism, and harkens back to the arguments behind the eugenics movement, which has been responsible for unspeakable human rights violations, including the forced sterilizations and gruesome murders of millions of human beings.
Another reason Time seems to imply Ashley should have aborted her child is because childbirth is painful. But again, killing an innocent person to spare someone else from physical pain makes little sense. Ashley should certainly have been given all available means to mitigate her pain, and it sounds like she was – the Time article mentions she received an epidural.
But one crucial point is not mentioned in the article: whether Ashley is receiving any counseling or mental health support and care. This is crucial for helping her process the trauma she experienced. Time seems unconcerned with this detail, however – it is too intent on exploiting this young girl’s suffering in an attempt to make a pro-abortion point.
The correct response to suffering is care, not killing. Ashley certainly needs and is deserving of care, but so is her child. Killing the latter would do nothing to undo the trauma of the former.
