Women will die

But only because they’ll make a choice they don’t have to make. They might think they have no other option but they do. As defenders of the rights of the unborn, and of all innocent human life, our job is to convince them of that.

As more and more states are enacting laws restricting abortion, setting up a challenge to Roe vs. Wade, supporters of abortion rights are fighting hard to secure those rights. One of their preferred tactical measures is attempting to heap blame and guilt on the opposition for the future deaths of pregnant women who will try to self-abort if the procedure is outlawed. Desperate women. Back-alley abortions. Coat hangers. This needs to be addressed.

The implication from their rhetoric is that if legal abortion is not available to women they will ipso facto attempt self-abortion and die from it…as if the illegality of abortion forces them to do that. And therefore the blame for their deaths lies squarely on the pro-life contingent.

But if any blame can be laid on one side or the other for self- or back-alley abortion deaths, it rightly should be shouldered by the pro-choice camp. They’re the ones who for decades have been telling women when they find themselves pregnant and don’t want to be, that the only real choice is abortion. How can that be denied knowing that they attack and denigrate pregnancy centers which do provide real options for women and personal, emotional, and material help for them and their children? So, naturally, a woman who’s been indoctrinated into a view which promotes killing the unwanted child as the best or only solution to her predicament will be more vulnerable to making the unwise choice to attempt it herself if it’s not legally available.

But abortion is neither the best nor the only solution to an unwanted pregnancy. This is what those of us who believe abortion is murder have been saying for all these decades. But so many women just don’t want to hear it because they want the easy way out. Pregnancy can be hard. Giving up a child for adoption is hard. Raising children is hard.

But a lot of things in life are hard yet we do or endure them anyway because they are necessary to achieve a goal or they benefit people we care about or we’re morally obligated to. And sometimes things are done to us which make our lives more difficult, but they can’t be undone and so we deal with it as best we can. Life can be hard.

But it can also be very rewarding, and often as a result of enduring something difficult. What’s not difficult is finding women who were tempted or pressured to abort a child but chose life instead and are so glad they did. They’d tell of a child who’s been their greatest blessing, or of the satisfaction of knowing they were able to bless a childless couple, and of not suffering the guilt that can plague a woman years after intentionally having her child killed.

There seems to be a prevailing cultural mindset today assigning moral value to difficult situations or choices such that something that makes your life harder is wrong in itself for that reason alone. So we feel morally justified in insisting that it’s wrong to “force” a woman to carry a child to term if she doesn’t want to because it would be harder for her than aborting the child. But this is plainly misguided. There is no evil inherent in difficulty, but there is in the unjustified taking of an innocent human life.

If we want to prevent women from endangering their own lives by self-aborting or going to black-market, back-alley abortionists, we need to shift the narrative now that tells them abortion is their best or only choice. If the Democrats and others who are pro-choice really care about women’s health and lives they’ll join forces with those of us who want women to know that they don’t have to kill the children they are not ready for or have no desire to bear and raise. They do have options. Children are incredibly valuable. Abortion is not the only and definitely not the best choice.