Sarah B.’s excellent Comment of the Day on the post, “Is This the Level of Critical Thinking Devoted To Pro-Abortion Advocacy?” stands on its own and makes any introduction from me supoerflous beyond, “Here it is.”
Here it is…
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I believe that the reasons many women want abortion to be legal are, when delving down deeply: fear and guilt. Please note that my argument is not meant to absolve anyone of responsibility, especially as I am dang near an anti-abortion absolutist, but instead what motives I have seen in my argumentation with pro-abortion (they hate that label because “we aren’t for abortion, we’re for women having the right to choose what is best”) advocates before the argument degenerates into some form of the above as their “knock down, undeniable” argument to shut me up. (Tearing it apart just turns into accusations of me being brainwashed and the conversation devolving into at least one side calling names, though my temper has occasionally dropped me to their level.)
I’m going to start with guilt, because it is the easiest to explain. Many women know someone who has had an abortion. My cousin had one for reasons that are at least sympathetic – the child was diagnosed with a genetic mutation that is always fatal if the diagnosis was correct (many are not) – even if I think she was completely in the wrong. She is hardly the only person in my circle that has had an abortion or helped someone obtain one. Most people who do this recognize somewhere that this may have been a “choice,” but it was the wrong choice. Many people are nearly eaten-up with guilt about the child they know they killed. I know people who have broken down in tears in private over this, even though they are pro-abortion in public.
They have pro-abortion stances that seem to cover up the guilt. They often act as though they believe that if everyone supports abortion and allows it up to birth or beyond, they will finally not feel guilty because the only reason they feel guilty is the societal pressure to accept that abortion killed a baby.
Fear, however, is the primary reason so many women want abortions to be legal. Men, since time immemorial, have gotten away with consequence-free sex, while women bear most of the negative consequences. Men don’t get pregnant. When it comes to STDs, women are far more susceptible then men, being the penetrated rather than the penetrator. Frankly, men (as a whole) desire sex more than women. It is a generality, but one that I have found to be true, as iin the saying, “Men trade love for sex and women trade sex for love.” This puts an unequal spin on the consequences.
Men, again generally speaking, desire sex more. Women bear a higher cost for sex than men. This lack of equality is a breeding ground for fear. Women who have regular sex will get eventually face pregnancy, contraceptives or no, if it continues over a long enough time span, assuming they do not have fertility issues,
There are many fears that women can have regarding pregnancy, and today’s society has bred even more. Men have the advnantage of consequence-free or at least consequence-reduced sex. See “The Scarlet Letter” or any dead-beat dad to prove my point. Women can fear that the trials of parenthood, and there are many, will leave them holding the bag when the man responsible bolts. This is exacerbated in today’s society when many of the Y-chromosomed fail to grow out of acting like boys and never develop into men.
Another fear is that having a baby ties you down to marriage to a man whom you should not be with. A girl’s crush on the wrong boy whom she then decides to sleep with so she can keep him can suddenly become horrible marriage, bound together with children when she becomes pregnant even when he actually does take responsibility. Sure, you can get divorced if things are too bad, but you are back to being a single mom, maybe with child support. The system also has a number of loopholes that can wreck any chance of acquiring a decent amount of money to help with the kids. Again, if you get pregnant and have a baby, the odds seem stacked against you.
There is also the fear of what kids will do to your education and career. If you have to pay for a babysitter, it hurts your chances of being able to afford college, and feeding two mouths while paying off student loans is harder than just feeding yourself. Of course, having to be up at night with a teething child rather than studying or sleeping before a test is its own struggle. How can you make it? And all those career women? If that is what you want out of life, you will struggle when you have to take time off because the kid is throwing up or has a fever, something that happens all the time when kids are little. Even when they are older, is your presence at their piano recital or sporting event more important than your presence working the hours needed to get that big promotion? A child makes achieving your goals harder.
What about all the things and experiences you want out of life? Society is pushing so many different concepts now of what happiness is, but very few of them work with children. You can’t reasonably take small children to many concerts. Sporting events are expensive and now you have to buy not one, but two tickets, or pay for a babysitter who costs a decent fraction of those tickets? The money that you spend on diapers, wipes, formula, clothes, medical care and the rest could have gone towards you having fun and enjoying life. Or maybe you are a minimalist and for you good times are possible living with the bare minimum. Well, that bare minimum is now cluttered with toys, covered in spit-up, and smelling like pooped diapers. There go your dreams.
Then there are the fears surrounding pregnancy itself. Honestly, maternal mortality rates aren’t that bad, if you ignore those who didn’t receive prenatal care, weren’t able to give birth with medical care at least nearby if not in the hospital, and who haven’t already had an abortion (which increases the chances of life-threatening complications in future pregnancies). However, women do die when pregnant, even in the best of circumstances. Therefore pregnancy is an elevated risk. What about complications? What if you really need an abortion to survive?
Adoption has its own fears. Assuming I do go the adoption route, what if the child has anything other than the perfect childhood? What about if they end up in foster care? What happens if they or, assuming I keep the child, we end up in poverty? All of that misery is avoidable with abortion.
There are other fears. There is the fear of rape. If you get raped, you could get pregnant. Surely you can’t be expected to have the baby of your attacker. What about the fear of disabled children who may or may not live as long as you want or fear? Birth defects happen, incest or not, but that fear is especially true if you were raped by a relative. What happens if you fall in love with this baby and it dies? Then you are left with heartbreak.
What happens if you have a special needs child? That could mean you have to care for that child all of its life and yours; you can never retire and might die in poverty. How about any horror story you hear about on social media that may or may not be the full truth? We NEED abortion to deal with this! If we can’t decide to end a pregnancy when something is wrong, we are not equal to men.
Again, these are not my beliefs, merely a summary of the beliefs I have heard whenever I speak with a pro-abortion believer. I can think of responses to most if not all of these. However, the response this post was based off of is essentially about getting rid of some of the fears. Usually I see that response coupled with a guarantee that men will no longer rape women, that medical care will be so advanced that women never have a problem with pregnancy, and that no woman will ever have to have a job she doesn’t want or is beneath her. The fears that drive women’s desire for abortion make for some illogical outcomes and arguments.
That being said, I am ashamed of my sex for our illogical outbursts that demand the deaths of our own children. The demand that started this post is just one of many of those illogical outbursts, and I apologize for my sex for their saying it.
Ethics Alarms 
Very well articulated and deserving of a COTD
Yep, Sarah’s thoughts were fantastic, and I would add that your writing in that same thread is worthy of an “honorable mention.”
I agree that fear is indeed a part of the complex. But now a lot of the fears so eleoqunetly articulated are mitigated by societie’s removal of the stigma of single parenthood. In fact, one can argue it is rewarded as a heroic virtue. Yet in spite, of this phenomena the number of abortions sought and obtained are increasing, even in the aftermath f Dobbs.
So, if fear truly the priamry motivator or is it soemthing else?
Deacon
I understood Sarah was saying the fear was related to reduced economic and social opportunities from being a single mother. I did not get the idea she was saying the fear stemmed from societal stigma.
You make a valid point about about the lack of stigma today. However, I believe their is a bifurcation among groups of women some like to claim the mantle of unsung hero/victim of being a poor oppressed single mom while others are more objective and seek terminations of pregnancies not because of any stigma but because nothing should interfere with their personal satisfaction. Fortunately, a third group are neither.
Deacon Dan,
While I do believe that getting rid of the shame of single motherhood has had many effects, I have not seen that fear of shame has been mentioned much. I have heard a little from people who say there are girls who need to have abortions because if they had a teen or college pregnancy, their uber-religious (usually said as an epithet) family would disown them or kick them out, so abortion has to be an option to save those girl from those horrible families from shame. However, most of the fear is of other sources, not fear of shame.
I do believe that fear is a primary motivator of women. Of course, there are others. Guilt, as mentioned above is a motivator, and frankly, the desire for “equality” with men is not small. Women want to have “consequence-free” sex as they imagine men have. They seem to want the freedom to have whatever sex they, or often some other imagined woman, could want.
However, the biggest thing that I see when I dialog with pro-choice women, is that the vast majority of their arguments end in fear. They fear all those different things that are mentioned above. They don’t usually use the word fear in their arguments, but when one boils down what they say into what it really means, the common denominator is fear.
There’s an anti-Larry Hogan add running in Md. where a father says that he worries about the future for his 16 and 22 year-old daughters because they might not have enough freedom to get abortions. Hogan, who has always said he was “pro-choice” (that’s the only way a GOP governor can be elected in the state, will “give a Republican Senate the power to pass a national abortion ban.” Or maybe to declare Danish the official language…
As usual, it is the left that is projecting their actions and beliefs onto the right. My church deals every month with women in the community that are thrown out of their houses and disowned because they refuse to get an abortion. The Catholic Church has Project Gabriel just to deal with this. The left hates this and wants all help to such mothers stopped as ‘hate speech’ or ‘misinformation’ or by using medical regulations. What do you think those ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ do? They help women being abused by their ‘pro choice’ and ‘pro abortion’ ‘loved ones’. They provide housing and supplies to help them support their child after they refuse to kill their baby because it is ‘convenient’.
Hell hath no fury like a woman told to even think about aborting a child she does not want. Hell also hath no fury like a woman told that abortion isn’t a fundamental right, maybe even the most important one. Hell also hath no fury like a woman told to take accountability for her choices.
I know that’s an oversimplification, but that’s really what it boils down to. Too many women want no consequences for ANYTHING, especially not for carrying on like the Fokken twins on a busy weekend.
Too many women also have bought into the idea that not allowing unfettered access to quick and easy abortion means that those opposed hate women and want to essentially reduce them to slaves. That’s nonsense. Except for a few serial killers, no one truly hates all women. There are those that find some traits more common in women annoying, but a lot of those traits would be annoying in anyone. There are those who have traditional beliefs about families that many women find repulsive. That doesn’t mean they hate women generally, just that they have a very specific vision that may appear outdated.
Just for the record, I myself, probably the most conservative person here, cringe at the websites I have seen for some of the women married to men like that, which are usually composed of updates on the kids, praise for the husband, Bible quotes about obedience, and videos of her and her kids that make the Amish in the movie Witness look liberated. Especially cringy are family photos in which only the husband and (maybe) the sons have shoes on, and every XX member of the family is barefoot.
Still, there’s a whole LOT of real estate between those mombots and abortion up to the day of birth. No one has ever been able to give me a convincing reason that abortion should be exempted from the democratic process that wasn’t all fear and anger.