Abortion proponents used to be a sunnier lot. Back in the hippie springtime of abortion advocacy they were filled with predictions about the benefits abortion would bring to society if only the legal limitations were removed. Abortion would be the answer to poverty, to crime, to illegitimacy and single-motherhood. Unlimited abortion was, in a word, a great good that Americans should no longer be denied.
It didn’t work out that way. Post Roe v. Wade, crime and poverty rose like Roman candles on the Fourth of July. Illegitimacy more than doubled and single motherhood became mainstream. And all of this happened during the course of nearly four decades and roughly 50 million abortions.
So it is not surprising that the abortion-is-good-for-society arguments are not heard much any more. Certainly they are still made elsewhere in the world, where the reality of unlimited legal abortion has not yet rendered them farcical. But here in the United States the issue has long been couched in the dreary cloak of “rights talk” and violence against women.
Until now. With the economy in crisis, abortion proponents may have a new platform from which to trumpet the old arguments. Consider the recent column by Bonnie Erbe, host of the little-watched PBS gabfest “To the Contrary,” titled “Abortion is Not a Tragedy.”
“The recession is driving American demand…for abortions,” she writes, citing stories about “the rising number of couples and single mothers doing the math and deciding this is no time to bring a child into the world.” Erbe says the media have portrayed this trend as something of a tragedy, but she rejoins: “It is not.”
She recounts an Associated Press story of a woman walking into the office of Oakland abortion doctor Pratima Gupta. Gupta told the AP that, “When I was doing the options counseling, she interrupted me halfway through, crying, and said, ‘Dr. Gupta, I just walked here for an hour. I’m sure of my decision.’” The woman is described as a mother of three whose boyfriend had just lost his job, who had no money for bus fare, and who wanted to abort this desired pregnancy after re-evaluating her expenses.
What luck that she bypassed all of the other abortion clinics in Oakland to walk through the doors of an abortionist who runs a blog on RH Reality Check, the well-funded “pro-choice” site founded by Ted Turner’s UN Foundation. Her story might never have come to light had she not walked to this particularly media-savvy abortionist.
And what luck for Erbe, who can now reflect on how sad everything is: The woman’s unweddedness (surely Erbe affirms her choice to raise a family unmarried, no?), the unemployed boyfriend, the three children (three!), the lack of bus fare. Amidst it all, she argues, abortion is realistic and beneficial. It is quite rational to want to do away with that little grasping demanding baby, she explains; the family will be better off without him - “and society as well.”
Ah, society. Aborting this child “benefits society in two ways,” says Erbe. First, the baby stands in the way of the couple being able to best equip their other children to become “contributor(s) to society.” And aborting him “reduces the chance the family will have to rely on scarce public resources to raise their children.” Yes, Bonnie, public resources are precious, especially in a down economy. (Presumably Californians paid for the abortion of this baby, but then abortion is a one-time outlay.)
Erbe laments the lost days “when abortion was not viewed as a tragic event.” When “it was not something that women whined about publicly on the scale many seem to now. Nor was it covered by the media or promoted by pro-choice politicians in ‘woe is me’ terms.”
It is pretty heartless to call women suffering after abortion “whiners.” (And doesn’t it give the lie to the assertion that “pro-choicers” are pro-woman?) Erbe should come to the March for Life and listen to the heart-breaking stories of women who aborted their children after pressure from family members, boyfriends, employers and doctors, and after imbibing the steady drip of pro-abortion ideology that emanates from so many American institutions (among them, declining old-line Protestant churches, local hospitals, and various charities) to which they might otherwise turn for help. Many of those women were pro-choice, too, just like Erbe, until they had an abortion and it devastated them.
In America, the beginning of consensus is the slow agreement that something should be changed. In the case of abortion there is, at least rhetorically, an emerging agreement that rather than being a public good, it is at best a private evil that should contract.
One of the great triumphs of the pro-life movement is that it has managed to stigmatize abortion so thoroughly that even pro-abortion advocates are forced to admit there should be fewer of them. Erbe’s cheerleading for abortion is the vestige of an old and tired advocacy that will not gain traction, no matter what happens to the economy.
