On September 24, TIME published an article by Quinn Cummings about illegal abortion.
According to Cummings, abortion already is illegal in the U.S., in practice. She tells the story of Jennifer Whalen, a mother who purchased abortion pills online for her 16-year-old daughter and was sentenced for breaking the law.
Cummings makes a number of flawed arguments, but one of the worst appears in her final paragraph:
Making abortions illegal doesn’t make them go away, and a decade of insidious legislative maneuvering isn’t going to change that. Since there has been an understanding of what pregnancy means on a biological level, human beings have been coming up with methods to end some of these pregnancies and most of these methods are risky, some life-threatening. …
When will abortion supporters realize the complete lack of logic in saying, “Since people are going to do ‘x’ anyway, ‘x’ should be legal”?
Since there has been “an understanding” of what sexuality “means on a biological level,” men have found methods to rape women. Should we stop our “insidious legislative maneuvering” since rape doesn’t go away because we make it illegal?
Armed robbery? The methods involved are “risky, some life-threatening.” Yet, do we ever ponder legalizing robbing a gas station employee at gun point?
C’mon. Let’s be a little smarter – and a lot more genuine – than arguing that something ought to be legal because people will commit the crime anyway and possibly put their own lives in danger.
If you can’t legitimately apply that argument elsewhere, it has no logical place in your pet issue.
Now for Cumming’s other flawed arguments:
1) Poor, poor Mrs. Whalen
Cummings tries to portray Jennifer Whalen as a good, caring mother. And while she may truly love her children, her actions in regards to her 16-year-old daughter were neither caring nor appropriate.
Cummings writes that after Mrs. Whalen’s daughter had taken the abortion pills and needed to be taken to the ER, “Because she wanted her daughter to get the best medical care, she told the doctor about the pills.” Because she wanted her daughter to get the best medical care? If this was the case, why did she merely trust her own research when attempting to cause a dangerous home abortion for her daughter? Why didn’t she seek medical advice at that time? It seems that would have been a rational time to talk with a doctor.
(Of course, the best course of action for a mother is to not give her daughter the means to kill her grandchild.)
For more on the serious risks of abortion pills (and the personal story of a former Planned Parenthood director) go here.
2) The insidious purpose of wait laws
Human child at 7 weeks of development – around the age of Mrs. Whalen’s grandchild.
According to Cummings, the purpose of 24 (or 48) hour wait laws is simple: “to inconvenience women seeking an abortion.”
But nope, that’s not it. Pro-lifers are really not here just to punish and inconvenience women. We care about women getting the real facts they need – and the time to let them sink in. True story after true story relates the horrible circumstances of women who were never told the truth about abortion and who were pressured into quickly killing their children.
Wait laws give women the opportunity to hear and consider the facts about the procedures and risks surrounding abortion as well as the truth of fetal development.
(Of course, Planned Parenthood doesn’t care about telling women the real facts first. Watch this video to see the lies rampant in Planned Parenthood’s abortion operations.)
3) Pro-lifers only care about the baby.
Yet another tired (and very false) argument. Cummings says:
For those people for whom the fetus is a viable human being whose needs outweigh every other person in the equation, this [the lack of abortion clinics in 87% of U.S. counties] is a victory.
It’s not “for those people” who believe. It’s the facts of science. (Also, neither we nor science say that every fetus is “viable” at every stage. But both say that every fetus is always an individual human being.)
We’re not talking about weighing “needs” here. We’re talking about the basic, civilized, human right to life. It can’t get more basic than that.
And for those who don’t believe they can “manage the costs associated with an extra child,” death is not the answer. I’d plead with anyone in that situation to consider adoption.
Abortion is NOT for women it is AGAINST us.
