There’s a reason you didn’t see Angie the Youtube Abortionist’s name listed amongst the nominees during Sunday’s Oscars: no one believes her when she says that she just “did something that women do every day.” She’s a blogger who smartly realized that the bottom-scrapping category of aborting-your-kid-on-Youtube niche wasn’t filled and bingo! Insta-celeb. It’s not enough for abortion to be legal; it needs to not be a big deal now, either. “De-mystifying?” No, desensitizing. Shock is so pedestrian.
It’s very, very difficult for me to show the compassion I feel compelled to show in instances such as these, mostly because a life was ended, a life described by his or her own mother as:
I can’t wait to get it over with and get back to being the writer, speaker, activist, silly, fun, girlfriend, mom I’d like to be, instead of the pissed off incubator I currently am. This is not a child; this is a squatter which could potentially become a child.
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Right now I feel like I have a tapeworm or some kind of horrible infection.
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Whatever last minute doubts I may have had were squashed by spending yesterday in a crowded room (church auditorium, actually) with 600 special needs children, during my son’s school field trip. Holy crap, am I glad I’m getting an abortion!
Oh goodness. The prejudice against the quality of life that those with special needs enjoy. It screams PREJUDICE to me. I’ve relatives with special needs; cousins with Down Syndrome, other disabilities, who are we to disparage their quality of life? Those who would hold such viewpoints should get over themselves.
The “health reasons” she cites from her first pregnancy?
I knew I wasn’t healthy. I’d been doing drugs with my boyfriend (which was why I left him) and I’d been suffering a particularly bad bout of anorexia. I also knew there was a good chance I was fairly far along in my pregnancy. While my periods had changed, and for the last two months even stopped, I’d assumed it was amorrhea caused by my low weight.
Drugs. Oh, the priorities. She had enough money to afford her dope habit but not enough for early prenatal care or even care for herself regarding anorexia (what is a “bad bout” of anorexia? If the problem is admittedly recognized why not stop buying drugs and use the money to seek help?) Please spare me the drug addiction sob stories; I’m the child of a one-time user and have seen it ruin the lives of friends and family members; it’s a choice.
I quit smoking pot, and mostly quit smoking cigarettes. (Yeah, I snuck a few here and there, most memorably on my wedding day, early in my third trimester.)
Attempting a return to sobriety while being admittedly too pregnant at that point for an abortion is obviously difficult. Health concerns brought on by reckless behavior. These are the excuses which this woman uses to shirk her responsibility as a mother.
This action supposed to speak to women’s rights is completely ironic (even more so considering today is International Women’s Day or Something) – considering that abortion kills more women than men. Something used as a prop for grrrl power is actually female genocide.
(Sometimes I wonder if fetuses ever lament over the mothers in which they’re housed instead of the other way around.)
The woman’s health problems aren’t to blame; they are a symptom of her reckless behavior, behavior for which a child had to die. The “blob of cells” in her womb will not at any point grow into a fish, a dog, a cow, or an owl; it will only grow to become a human because the DNA is distinctly human. It is, at this point, a very young child and the misfortune of both the young and old is that they have to depend upon errant, sometimes irresponsible people for care. It is a human, a young human, and to deny it rights based upon development is the worst sort of discrimination, the worst infringement of civil rights.
Sure, very young children, still in utero, cannot survive outside of it; newborns cannot survive outside the womb unless they are cared for; people with diabetes cannot survive unless they have insulin; people like my cousin cannot survive unless they receive an organ transplant; if that’s the critera for determining right to life, well, then there are a lot of people on this earth who, by that very logic, should be denied life.
I want to be mad at this woman, mad because she refuses responsibility for her actions, mad at her on the behalf of two different sets of friends who are battling fertility problems and would sell their organs if it meant conceiving a child of their own; mad because she treats something so wonderful as though it deserves the negative value she assigns it. Someone upstairs thought she was deserving of a blessing. I want to be mad at her, but it’s hard. I know – as I’ve been told by a few women among my acquaintance who’ve had abortions – that one day she will look at her little family and realize that one person is not there. Her heart will be heavy. Grace is for all.
I’m not calling her a whore or any other name that those precariously perched on a moral high horse have done. What does that accomplish? Soften, don’t harden the heart. I’m not linking to her website either (the origin of the quotes), simply because I do not support glorifying the situation but want to highlight the disconnect between the message and the logic.
You cannot, CANNOT claim to want rights for all … but some. You cannot cherry-pick civil rights.
They are for all or they are for no one.
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