I Am a Woman and You Do Not Speak for Me: A Former "Unwanted Fetus" on Abortionists' Bigotry, Hypocrisy, and Misogyny

 

Jeenah Moon Bloomberg Getty Images Source

"I Am a Woman and You Do Not Speak for Me."

A Former "Unwanted Fetus" on Abortionists' Hypocrisy, Bigotry, and Misogyny  

 

This essay is not an argument for or against legal abortion. I think, for reasons I won't detail here, that abortion should be legal. Even if Roe is overturned, abortion will be legal in many American states in the east, west, Midwest, north, and south. These are heavily populated states: California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Team Pro-Abortion is fomenting coat-hanger hysteria for Machiavellian reasons. "Democrats, looking to hold on to their slim control of Congress, are hoping that abortion will galvanize their voters in an otherwise tough year for the party," reports the New York Times.

 

This essay does not address abortion in the case of rape, incest, maternal or fetal health. Statistics show that the vast majority of American abortions are performed for parental convenience, rather than for rape, incest, or maternal or fetal health. In any case, Team Pro-Abortion wants abortion on demand, without reference to the reasons for the abortion, right up to the moment of delivery (see for example here, here, here, here, here.)

 

This essay does not condemn anyone, male or female, for the sole reason that he or she has chosen abortion. 

 

This essay does not debate feminism. I started working for a salary outside the home before I was legally old enough to do so. I've been working ever since. Unlike many pro-abortion scolds, this feminist has never lived off a husband's earnings. I've traveled the world, gotten a PhD, published books, and taken a risky public stand against gender apartheid.

 

In Asia, I and fellow female aid workers formed an organization we laughingly dubbed "RIFT" for "Radical Insurgent Feminist Terrorists." We defied our male colleagues, our superiors, and village custom, and we took great risks thereby, by addressing the deadly misogyny in the Hindu and Muslim subcontinent, for example: through chhaupadi, the custom that demands that menstruating females sleep outside; the families that keep their daughters out of school; forced marriages; and child sex slavery. We took action in remote outposts where the powers that be could destroy us. No keyboard scold who fantasizes herself an "activist" can lecture me about feminism.

 

Though I think abortion should be legal, I recognize that abortion ends a human life. I think that ending a human life entails a moral cost. My wish would be that those of us who feel this way educate the young.

 

To lower the number of abortions, girls need to be taught, not just about birth control, but also how to say "No." No student has complained to me that she felt too constrained to have sex. Many girls came to me to weep about feeling forced into sex that they didn't want, and didn't know how to get out of, and that they later regretted. Girls wept about being too fat, about not being pretty enough, about thinking that he really loved them and then he walked away. Suddenly alone, they aborted the baby of a boy they couldn't keep because, as society told them, and as they told themselves, they were not hot enough, and they were, therefore, worthless, as was their baby.

 

We need to teach the difference between the word "boy" and the word "man" and the word "responsibility" that separates the two. We need to teach about the importance of fathers to children, and what happens to kids without their biological father present in their childhood.

 

We need to teach young people about the miracle that transpires in the womb of a pregnant woman. Let us communicate this: life is sacred, and a woman's body and her unique, mysterious power command reverence and awe.

 

We have to cultivate a sense of wonder. Our culture really doesn't want us to regard nascent human life as a miracle. Our culture violates women's bodies every second of every day, with violent and degrading internet porn, school bullying, music lyrics, and cultural products that exploit titillation for cash. Kim Kardashian's latest makeup trick is a miracle. Human life is disposable. A woman's body, stripped of any shred of clothing or dignity, is on the auction block in every public forum.

 

What, then, is this essay about? After the May 2, 2022, Politico leak of a draft majority opinion overturning Roe v Wade, my Facebook page, as well as mainstream media, was flooded with a volcanic lava flow of hate-mongering, masochistic whining, stinking hypocrisy, and manipulative lies.

 

This essay is my rant against the hate, the lies, the hypocrisy, the misogyny, and the cowardice of Team Pro-Abortion.

 

Some will object to the moniker "Team Pro-Abortion," hereinafter TPA. I refuse TPA's Orwellian euphemisms. "Shout Your Abortion," they insist. "I've Had 17 Abortions!" a protester bragged. "I'm killing babies!" another boasts. "We love abortion!" and "Abortion is a gift!" signs read. Knowing that the SCOTUS reversal was on the horizon, TPA activists have been preparing materials on how to perform your own abortion. What are they not doing? Working to make crisis pregnancies less frequent through sexual self-control, birth control, or erotic alternatives to intercourse. In fact, some members of TPA have attacked a crisis pregnancy center – that is, an agency that helps pregnant women with financial, medical, and adoption support. The attackers do not want women to have any options other than abortion. They are not pro-choice. They are pro-abortion.

 

The moniker "Pro-Choice" is transparent, cowardly, diabolical propaganda. By demanding that we use the word "choice," TPA forces us to erase an innocent, victimized, human life. We aren't talking about "choices" here. We aren't talking about an abstraction, about the firing of neurons as one waffles between chocolate or vanilla.

 

We're talking about flesh-and-blood human bodies that, through the choices of the very people who created those bodies, end up as medical waste. There is no difference between those bodies and our bodies except time. We were all once those bodies. When we were helpless, voiceless and invisible to the wider world, through no virtue or strength of our own, a woman allowed us the time to grow to the point where society might be willing to stand up for our right not to be snuffed out. These are not "choices": flesh-and-blood arms and legs, fingers and toes, eyes and ears, of utterly defenseless life forms that exercised no choice to be created from the meeting of sperm and egg, so that somebody could have an orgasm. These are not choices but human lives that suffer capital punishment for a crime they never committed.

 

Even the Quran, a book that is otherwise tough on women, expresses tenderness for these life forms that TPA dismisses with the word "choice." The Quran says that finally, at the end of time, the ghost of a victim of female infanticide is asked what crime she committed for which she was buried alive in Arabia's sands. The Quran is attempting, through irony, to prick the conscience of the reader. The female infant committed no crime. She was killed by her own parents because she was inconvenient, and, as a girl, unwanted, and that brutality is a fact no euphemism should be allowed to disguise.

 

It's always a red flag when accurate vocabulary becomes verboten. "Pro-Choice" is just one of many Orwellian phrases adopted by TPA. There's also "products of conception" for the physical remains of the dead fetus. National Public Radio, Wikipedia, and the New York Times say "abortion care" rather than "abortion," trying to transform an ugly word into a pretty one by appending the suffix "care." Kind of like "siphoning-the-brain-out-of-the skull care" or "dismemberment care."

 

On NPR, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries ranted about wicked Republicans denying women "health care." I don't think Jeffries ever used the word "abortion." Abortion: you must love it, but can't see it, and you can't say it. TPA even gets worked up about the word "abortionist," insisting that "abortion provider" be used. The word "abortionist" is comparable to the phrase "final solution," one doctor writes, apparently unaware of how revealing his comment is.  

 

A human fetus is "a clump of cells." And that is not the worst thing they call a human fetus. The Facebook page "Occupy Democrats" posted a meme that encourages viewers to conflate a human fetus with an animal fetus, as per the falsehoods circulated by influential Darwinist and eugenicist Ernst Haeckel. Under this meme, a poster remarked that a human fetus is comparable to his "boogers," that is, snot. Another post remarked, "Birthing babies is the emotional distraction to creating a Fascist country." A Facebook friend holds a PhD in the hard sciences. On his page, one of his leftist friends compared a human fetus to "cancer." I did not see my scientist friend object. Rather, he said, "Instead of referring to the embryo as a 'clump of cells,' given the demographics, it might be more accurate to say 'future cartel enforcer,' or 'future STD-infected crack ho.'" He said this because low income black and Hispanic women are much more likely to get abortions.

 

In any case, if TPA's chosen God – perhaps Oprah or Obama – came down from Heaven and announced to them in unambiguous language that a fetus is a human life, they would still be Pro-Abortion. They celebrate selfish power of the strong over the weak as the highest virtue, and vulnerability and dependence as crimes justifying capital punishment. A popular Facebook page makes just this argument. "It doesn't matter whether a fetus is a human being or not … it doesn't matter if we are talking about a fertilized egg, a baby, or a five year old." We are stronger so we have the right to kill.

 

Another Facebook friend, someone who spends hours devoted to animal rescue, said that she believes in abortion up to and including infanticide of a born child. Killing is morally acceptable, she argued, if a child – a dependent human being – is unwanted by anyone who will meet the child's needs.

 

Atheist and Princeton University ethicist Peter Singer concurs. Infants, "because they are not 'persons,' have no interest in staying alive, and it is only superstition that makes us think that killing them is intrinsically wrong … Infants with known disabilities … do not bring the same amount of happiness into the lives of their parents … the very fact that someone is disabled means that he or she will have an unhappier life … Singer argues that it should be legal for parents to decide to have their disabled infants killed up to 28 days after birth."

 

Is TPA correct? Is a fetus "just a clump of cells"? In a 2017 article, MD and PhD Ana Maria Dumitru writes that "A new study demonstrates that human embryos autonomously direct their own development from the very earliest moments of life – even when they are not in their mothers' wombs." She despaired that her scientific colleagues still used the outdated and inaccurate phrase "just a clump of cells." "If we define organismal autonomy to mean freedom from external control, it turns out that we can identify precisely when an embryo satisfies the definition of autonomy: from the very beginning."

 

I used to be a leftist. One day I was with friends, and someone had a poster. In design, it was very like a Soviet-era propaganda poster. It was blocky, angry, and red, black, and gray. It looked a lot like this poster, or this one, announcing, "Fascism! The Most Evil Enemy of Women!" A bulky, rage-filled every-woman screamed at the viewer. She was a dumpy monument to righteous indignation. The caption read, "A FETUS IS NOT A BABY! A WOMAN IS NOT AN INCUBATOR! ABORTION IS NOT MURDER!"

 

That poster stopped me, in more ways than one.

 

The left, I was sure, was all about being kind. About championing the oppressed. About condemning selfishness, greed, exploitation. We were on the side of prisoners on death row, of striking workers, of the handicapped who needed government services. We were anti-fur and pro-vegan.  

 

Why were we betraying the most vulnerable humans of all? Why were we championing a morality that privileged the selfish convenience of the powerful ignoring the very lives of the powerless? I was not alone. In 1980, Mary Meehan published "Abortion: The Left Has Betrayed the Sanctity of Life: Consistency Demands Concern for the Unborn."

 

It took me decades to puzzle this out. Here's one answer. As a joke had it, the left likes to "Think Globally and Screw Up Locally." And another, "Love Humanity but Hate People." In other words, it's easy to protest against oppression that doesn't affect your privileges, comfort, and power. Also, the left's righteous indignation was always more about hating the designated oppressor than about loving the oppressed. The hated oppressor had to be representational of Western Civilization. We didn't protest Mao's murder of tens of millions of Chinese. We raged at Ronald Reagan, a white, male, American.

 

No endangered species could be more "local" than a fetus in one's womb. And the executioner holding the ax above that fetus was not Ronald Reagan. In standing up for the life of the fetus, one was not raging against Reagan's alleged crimes against distant Nicaraguans. One was risking going against the comrade standing right next to you. One risked saying to her, "Be kind to the life in your womb. Show the same concern for her tiny life that you show for fur-bearing animals."

 

My comrades' dedication to the oppressed was nothing more than a theatrical production in service to a narrative. It was all sets, costumes, scripts. Yes, yes, the left will tell you that they champion the powerless. When they tell you that, they are exiting objective reality and entering the gauzy realm of fairytale storytelling. The left simply takes the costume, "The Victim," and the other costume, "The Oppressor," and assigns those costumes to serve political ends.

 

Thus, the woman choosing to abort the life inside her is draped in "The Victim" costume. She chose to have consensual sex, knowing full well that intercourse creates life. Who victimized her? Amerikkka, of course; who else? You had to ask??? An astounding meme now circulates. It insists that America forces women to get pregnant and have children. This meme from "Susan of Texas" has been shared thousands of times.

 

With the deft touch of a pickpocket, the left has transposed The Victim role from the life form that ends up dismembered in a petri dish – the fetus – to the woman choosing to terminate that life. The antagonist is not the fetus; the fetus is erased through euphemism. It's a "clump of cells." Rather, the antagonist is "misogyny," "patriarchy," or "The Catholic Church." In objective reality, none of these made the choice for sexual intercourse that the woman made; in the leftist theatrical production they are all the mustache-twirling villains who control the poor, poor woman's agency. They got her pregnant, not her own choices.

 

None of these Facebook posts, not a single one, made any statement about abortion per se. Abortion per se is difficult to defend. TPA could have posted, for example, images of the instruments used to perform abortions: the suction catheter, a vacuum that sucks the fetus out of the womb, the scrapers that patrol the womb to extract every last finger and toe, the embryotomy scissors that snip the fetus to shreds.

 

If abortion is an unalloyed good, I said to Facebook friends, rather than hateful caricatures of priests and nuns, why don't you post images of abortion? Not "Shout your abortion," but "Illustrate your abortion." Post, with pride, a photo of your aborted fetus. I posted an image of an aborted fetus; Facebook immediately hid my post. Apparently we must all love abortion without knowing what it looks like.

 

Google, like Facebook, is on Team Pro-Abortion, and like everyone else on TPA, Google plays Orwellian games. Google hides what it needs to hide and promotes what it needs to promote to prop up the leftist narrative about abortion. Perform the same search, for texts or images, of any abortion-related term, and, I quickly learned, Google and Duck Duck Go return completely different results. Google instructs me that abortion regret is a "myth." Duck Duck Go allows me to hear firsthand accounts of real women suffering abortion regret.

 

TPA could have posted descriptions of "choice," like this one: "Forceps are inserted into the uterus to forcibly dismember the fetus, and the pieces are removed one by one. Larger fetuses must also have their skulls crushed so the pieces can pass through the cervix." Here's a video that depicts the same procedure.

 

Dr. Anthony Levatino, an "abortion care provider," reports that "You will know you have it right when you crush down on the Sopher clamp and see a pure white gelatinous material issue from the cervix. That was the baby's brains. You can then extract the skull pieces … A little face may come out and stare back at you."

 

Or this one from abortionist Dr. Warren Hern, "The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current."

 

Or this from abortionist Dr. Suzanne Poppema, "Abortion procedures are not aesthetically pleasant … They're saying, 'Oh, we think it's a horrible idea to kill little babies about to be born.' Well, I'm not going to say I think it's a good idea."

 

Or this, "It ain't meant to be pleasant … This is not a form of Saturday afternoon entertainment." When people object to this doctor that burning the fetus to death, over the course of an hour, with salt, or sucking out its brains might prove a more or less unpleasant abortion method, he replies, "The outcome to the fetus is the same, is it not?"

 

Afterwards, abortionists piece together the "products of conception." They must do this to ensure that no dismembered arms or legs or heads were left inside the womb. Such human remains – and that they are human remains belies the "clump of cells / my own body" claims of TPA – would cause infection. "This means poring over arms, legs, torsos, and little crushed heads from abortions."

 

Annette Lancaster, a former Planned Parenthood director, "was not new to the medical field. She'd seen and dealt with sick and injured people, and witnessed surgeries. But nothing prepared her … 'to actually see … the workers piecing the baby back together in a petri dish … I've seen many women break down and cry.'"

 

Lancaster said in an interview that she and her co-workers could not bring themselves to talk to outsiders about their grim tasks. Rather, they gathered with other abortionists and abused drugs and alcohol to cope "with the things that we did and the things that we saw." After an "abortion day … we would say that we were having a staff meeting … we would get pretty intoxicated." Even her children noted a change in Lancaster. She would refer to the women who came for abortions as "cows" and "cattle." "We called the trashcan where we would put the aborted babies the 'nursery.'" She underwent a "hardening of the heart"

 

No, Team Pro-Abortion very much did not post about abortion on Facebook. What did TPA post? These "feminists" posted unattractive images of Catholic women. Catholic women as stupid, oppressive, backward sheep. Bigoted images mocked and degraded Amy Coney Barrett, a SCOTUS justice and a woman of high accomplishment. They depicted all Catholic women as characters in the Christophobic TV show, The Handmaid's Tale. The left decided that the woman having the abortion would play the role of victim, and Amerikkka and Catholicism would play the role of oppressor. The fetus would remain as invisible and silent as she is in a woman's womb, or in a petri dish.

 

I used to think that women who, like me, called themselves "feminists" shared my goal of demonstrating, through my own actions, to the entire world, that women are every bit as competent as men. A woman could be president, could control nuclear codes, could decide issues of national import. TPA insists that women are such helpless little flibbertigibbets that we can't manage our own bodies.

 

"We can't help but get pregnant – woops! I just got pregnant while writing that sentence! I'm a woman! I CAN'T HELP IT. I exercise no choice. I was drunk. I was tired. He was hot. I forgot to take the pill. In the same way that it was impossible for me to control my sex life, it is also impossible for me to take responsibility for my own choices. No, I can't put the baby up for adoption. No, I can't raise the life I chose to create. I'M HELPLESS. Society must rescue me by providing me with a taxpayer-funded abortion. And society must silence my victim by calling her, not a 'life,' but a 'choice.'" No narrative infantilizes women like the TPA narrative.

 

Remember the feminist anthem "I Am Woman"? "I am strong," the song lyric reports. "I am invincible." But, TPA insists, I wither and collapse when confronted with personal responsibility. Attributing any agency or intelligence whatsoever to women is verboten by team abortion. Just try saying, "Use birth control. Think before you f---. Exercise self restraint. Achieve orgasm through an act not involving intercourse," and watch TPA lose their minds.

 

Could we sell this narrative about men? That men are both simultaneously so helpless that they can't prevent ejaculating inside a vagina, but that they are also as super-competent and Oval-Office-ready as that feminist heroine, Kamala Harris? No. We could never sell that narrative about men because we define "a man" as a competent adult who exercises self-control. In civilized societies, men pay a very high price for lack of penis-control.

 

The TPA narrative scripts women as pitiable children requiring rescue. We rescue these women by calling the woman who has chosen abortion a "brave" "victim" when in fact, she is, at the very least, a selfish perpetrator. If you can't call a woman who voluntarily chooses to have sex and then to end the life that sex inevitably produces a "perpetrator," you also can't call her an "adult." Only coddled children are free from the consequences of their choices.

 

Once I realized that my comrades' compassion for victims was just a big stage show, I realized another thing. The left could and someday will edit its narrative, and wrap The Oppressor costume around the woman choosing abortion. If a leftist state needs babies, that leftist state will change the narrative. The Victim costume will drop over the fetus.

 

The left has shifted its narrative already. In recent years, the left has come to insist that men can have babies. This confuses the "No uterus no opinion" chant. TPA had previously erased the word "mother" from official documents; "birthing person" replaces it. "Chest feeding" must replace "breast feeding." After the SCOTUS leak, suddenly, once again, only women have babies. We have always been at war with Eastasia. We have never been at war with Eastasia.

 

There's another feature of abortion that demonstrates the left's narrative manipulation for political ends, and TPA's utter contempt for women.

 

Bare Branches, a classic work addressing female infanticide, reports that in Asia, even in impoverished regions, parents spend money on amniocentesis, in order to determine the sex of their fetus. If the fetus is female, she is aborted. Sex-selective abortion is so valued that, "districts which lack such basic amenities as potable water and electricity have prenatal sex-determination clinics. Rural health centers with no facilities for testing for TB, or to maintain the cold chain for oral polio vaccine" perform amniocentesis to determine fetal sex. "Even marginal farmers and landless laborers were willing to take loans at 25 % interest to avail themselves" of sex-selective abortion of girls. In one study, of eight thousand aborted fetuses, 7,999 were female.

 

Chinese biostatistician Fengqing Chao estimates that tens of millions of Asian girls have been destroyed through sex-selective abortion. In a 2021 scholarly article, Chao wrote, "Skewed levels of the sex ratio at birth due to sex-selective abortions have been observed in several countries since the 1970s. They will lead to long-term sex imbalances in more than one-third of the world's population with yet unknown social and economic impacts on affected countries."

 

Statistics suggest that sex-selective abortion is practiced among Asians in the US. When confronted with the reality of sex-selective abortion, TPA shouts "Hoax!" "Myth!" "Racism!" and "Sexism!" Yes, TPA argues that it is "sexist" to ban abortions performed only because a healthy fetus is female.

 

The fetus, TPA assures us, is worthy of death because the fetus is dependent. As a teen, I worked as a nurse's aide for dying and other severely incapacitated patients. They were dependent on me and other teenage, minimum-wage workers, for toilet functions, eating, sleeping, and, in some cases, breathing. Without aides, our patients could be dead within hours if not days. I came to love my patients, because I came to see their humanity. I remember their names, first and last, and even their room numbers.

 

I did not love them on the first day. Seeing pee and poop, pus and blood stain my pink uniform, I was overwhelmed by "Ew." It was exactly my work to meet their needs that brought me to love them, and to realize something rather amazing: a person can be old, ugly, incapacitated, and still be one hundred percent human, and lovable. Years later, when my sister was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, I brought my nurse's aide skills to our interactions. She lost the ability of coherent speech, and I had to change her diapers, but she was my sister.

 

"Beth" is adamantly pro-abortion. Recently, Beth's nephew was dying of a degenerative illness that robbed him of coherent speech. She loved this boy, but she decided not to visit him in his final days. She didn't want to be exposed, she said, to someone who wasn't her "real nephew." I responded, "He can't speak. He can't even swallow on his own … how can you be sure that at this moment, when he is in extremis, no longer athletic, no longer handsome, young, and charming, that you will not encounter your 'real nephew'?"

 

My friend Ian's newborn son Hugh suffered from hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy. The lad was incapable of much of what we consider not just enjoyable, but also simply human. He was tube fed for most of his life, and ventilator-dependent for his final several years. He was nine when he passed away, which is at about 8 1/2 years older than it was predicted he would live. Ian said to me, "Legal abortion – and certainly the concept of abortion as a 'right,' or a good thing, or anything less than a tragedy, even if very occasionally necessary – can only rest on making the definition of a human person relative rather than absolute. If 'humanity' is defined by ability, or ability to live independently, then the profoundly disabled like our son are less than fully human. Ditto the elderly, the terminally ill and seriously mentally ill."

 

One day I was listening to TPA speakers who were working to convince their audience of the rightness of their decision. Far into the talks, as one account came to resemble another, my mind wandered and I began to perform a "find and replace." Every time they said that this or that circumstance justified abortion, I replaced "abortion" with "murder."

 

"I was young, desperate, and poor. I had a boss who sexually harassed me. He could have sabotaged my career. So I murdered my boss, and getting rid of him made my life much easier, and my career soared." "I was old and already had five children. My husband emptied our bank account to gamble. So I murdered my husband, and our family has been much better off economically." "I'm not obligated to justify my choice. This person annoyed me, I'd be better off without her around, so I murdered her." When you can perform that particular find and replace, and the word "murder" fits, the verb it replaces is not justifiable.

 

TPA's conviction that it can differentiate without error between human lives that are worthy of life and those that are not meshes neatly with the justifications for genocide offered by Heinrich Himmler in his SS speeches. "We must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest." For Himmler, too, the line between life-worthy-of-life and clumps-of-cells was very clear.

 

Not just Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs were "life unworthy of life." Sick Germans were also subject to mass killing in the Nazi program called Aktion T4. Nazis produced massive amounts of propaganda honed to recruit Germans into killing their own fellow citizens. Hitler himself wrote a memo encouraging "mercy death" for "incurably sick" Germans. The killing of defective Germans began before and continued after the war. Robert Wagemann, a German boy, was about to be subjected to euthanasia when he escaped. His only abnormality was a limp from his breech birth. Stanford historian Robert N. Proctor refers to Aktion T4 as the "rehearsal" for the Holocaust. Given this history, we do not have to speculate about slippery slopes.

 

If we present any of these concerns to Team Pro-Abortion, they repeat a scripted response, one that, of course, reinforces their narrative that anyone who opposes abortion is an oppressor, and that they in TPA are the compassionate ones, and the victims of right-wing evil. "They don't care about handicapped people! They just want to dominate women!!!"

 

Then TPA shares a meme from "Pastor" Dave Barnhart. Suddenly Christophobes who had been screeching that the Eucharist should be burned and demonizing Catholic women as primitive idiots too stupid to vote for Hillary Clinton quote a Christian pastor, or at least a man who plays a Christian pastor on the internet. Barnhart's meme alleges that Christians don't care about the unborn at all. Christians never do anything to help needy people. Christians just talk about the unborn to hide their own racism and sexism.

 

Statistics show that Christians donate and support massive charitable work around the globe (see here and here). Further, people I know personally are active in pro-life work. My friend Daria Sockey, a Catholic author, volunteers with crisis pregnancy centers. "I teach infant care, financial management, job-seeking, how to buy a car, or leave an abusive relationship. We also supply diapers, wipes and baby clothing. I see the same mom twice a month for two years or more. We form  relationships; we let them know that there is someone who cares about them and their children." Daria's work is all the more remarkable, given that Daria has a special needs son who requires a great deal of her attention. Ian, a Christian, dedicated his life to his handicapped son Hugh. TPA spits on and defames these inspirational models of ethical behavior.

 

TPA takes any admiration one might feel for those who support women in crisis pregnancies and transposes it to women who aborted their offspring. TPA circulated a meme featuring author Ursula K. LeGuin. In the meme, LeGuin tells about being a Radcliffe senior who has consensual sex with her abusive boyfriend and becomes pregnant. She could not allow her baby to live, LeGuin insists, because to do so would have caused her a lifetime of poverty. LeGuin demands that the reader assess her as the poor, sad, helpless martyr. Her victimizer is "a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law," a "Christian law." "We are the light," she declares, exactly because she aborted her child.

 

LeGuin lies. In fact she was from a wealthy and prominent family; I once worked as a carpenter in a building named after her father. Well, it was once named for her father; I just discovered that Woke Overlords demanded it be renamed because LeGuin's father was a notorious Dead White Male. LeGuin was at Radcliffe, the all-female wing of Harvard, not exactly a school full of Little Match Girls. LeGuin could have given birth and given her child up for adoption. Her cry of potential lifelong poverty for her or the child is a lie. In any case, I suspect that most people, given a choice between lifelong poverty and never existing at all might choose the former. Cecily Strong made a similar career argument on Saturday Night Live: If I had not aborted my child, I never would have been a cast member on Saturday Night Live. Quite the priorities.

 

LeGuin describes mothers as "useless women." That is, they are not rich and famous authors as she was. In fact J.K. Rowling, Dorothy Day, Anzia Yezierska, Eliza Orzeszkowa, and Tillie Olsen are a few of the women who had babies and lived through difficult circumstances and produced writing that others purchase and read.

 

LeGuin, like Himmler, with a writer's merciless economy, divides her offspring into life worthy of life and unworthy life. She refers to the child she aborted as "the unwanted one," "a life nobody wanted," whose very existence somehow threatened "the three wanted children." Killing her firstborn was not enough. She must also accuse this innocent of somehow conspiring to prevent her from enjoying the subsequent children she found it in herself to love. In the Gospel according to TPA, there are good fetuses, worthy of life, and bad fetuses, deserving only of death. What differentiates them? If a rich, famous and successful celebrity wants them.

 

After media darling Chrissy Teigen had a highly publicized miscarriage, abortion-friendly press organs referred to what she lost as her "child," her "son," and her "baby." "To our Jack," she wrote. "I'm so sorry that the first few moments of your life were met with so many complications, that we couldn’t give you the home that you needed to survive. We will always love you." When a hot Trump critic like Teigen suffers a miscarriage, what she lost is not a "clump of cells," but, rather, a "baby."  

 

Facebook friend Joseph made an interesting observation about the LeGuin meme. "Men get to be bastards because abortion is an option. It's an illustration of a culture created by the de-stigmatization of abortion. Without abortion, the man would have to be responsible for his own actions; abortion gives him the option of shifting all the responsibility onto the woman and blaming her for it."

 

I remember a word that used to be applied to husbands and fathers when I was a kid. "Provider." It was the woman's job to mother, and the man's job to provide. The Sexual Revolution changed that. Now it is the woman's job to spread her legs indiscriminately, and the man's job to skedaddle after satisfaction. A man is different from a boy. The difference between a man and a boy is responsibility.

 

Those sharing LeGuin's meme censor her words in an interesting way. In the original, LeGuin writes, "I can hardly imagine what it's like to live as a woman under fundamentalist Islamic law." In the meme shared online, mention of Islam is scrubbed. It falls down the memory hole, just like her famous daddy's name on what used to be Kroeber Hall; just like the suddenly taboo faces in Stalin photographs. Again, leftist compassion is merely a puppet. The hand underneath is a fist aimed at the West. One does not criticize Islam. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

 

TPA accuses Christians and Amerikkka of "forcing" women to become pregnant. Forced pregnancy occurs everyday in the Muslim world, where Islam forbids age-of-consent laws, because Mohammed, mankind's perfect example, married a six-year-old when he was over fifty. Children are forced to produce children, and often suffer fistulas as a result of pregnancy forced on an underage body. Girls whose bodies are torn in this way leak urine and feces. I have never seen a "pro-choice feminist" voice a peep of protest. 

 

Back to the commie poster. "A WOMAN IS NOT AN INCUBATOR." I knew the poster was wrong in many ways. Let me close on how the poster was wrong in this way.

 

I am an incubator. Every woman on the planet is an incubator, including those who can't have kids; including those of us who never had kids.

 

God, or evolution, or both, formed me to be an incubator, not just in placing a womb between my ridiculously wide hips. We women, as a group, value relationships with other people over objects; we can read rooms better than we can read maps. We gravitate to helping professions like nursing and teaching and professions involving beauty and cooking – nurturing skills. We "tend and befriend" rather than "fight or flight." We recognize colors more accurately than do men – and that ability is directly related to distaff tasks. We are the only mammals with permanently engorged breasts. Other creatures might display their buttocks to invite intercourse. Humans often have sex face-to-face and breasts mimic the shape of buttocks to facilitate the greater intimacy that face-to-face sex affords. I was once a tomboy, I am now a spinster, and in many ways I don't fit in with the gals, but from the top of my head to the soles of my feet I am a woman, and I am an incubator of life, and that is a miracle, not a curse.

 

Danusha Goska, a.k.a. "Unwanted Fetus," is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery