Recently, abortion proponents decided if you can’t beat, join ’em, and began urging their people to counter post-abortive stories of regret with post-abortive stories of relief.
They launched the 1 in 3 Campaign and began writing articles explaining the importance of coming out.
Even Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards finally admitted to having an abortion skeleton in her closet, claiming it was easy peasy, even if something about it kept her from sharing the good news beyond her inner circle for years and years.
Abortion proponents now say it is wrong to connect abortions with sob stories, which further stigmatize the deed as something sought only in dire circumstances or for catastrophic reasons.
So they exalt the “freedom to f*** up,” lauding those like post-abortive Merritt Tierce, who bragged about not one but two! abortions in the New York Times, one garnered after an affair in which she was unsure of paternity, and the other sought after her attempt to trap a man via pregnancy failed. Tramps trump tragedy.
But do they practice what they preach? Only when convenient.
Despite the charade, the industry knows everyone but them thinks abortion is skanky, to say the least.
So, while Planned Parenthood committed nearly one million of the three million U.S. abortions of the past three years, it continues to use math gimmicks to insist abortion accounts for a minuscule portion of its business.
And in a Cosmo puff piece a few days ago, “How to get hired at Planned Parenthood,” Senior HR Officer Gaitre Lorick failed to ever bring up the a-word. It came up only once, in the article’s intro. Abortion is obviously not an employment magnet.
Lorick wrote candidates are expected to have “a basic understanding” of the organization, and to check out Planned Parenthood’s website for details. But there is no a-word at the supplied link. Lorick also touted Planned Parenthood’s internship program, but that link omits the a-word as well.
At the Washington Post, 16 “influential” feminists submitted what they hope to accomplish in 2015, and again, the a-word never came up. The closest was one invocation of the vague term “reproductive rights.”
Everyone knows you can’t be a feminist if you’re not pro-abortion. It’s the litmus test.
But the feminists listed just about everything but abortion as important agenda items for the new year – living wages, gender equality, police brutality, domestic violence, LGBT justice, digital dualism, online harassment, hate speech, rape, quality childcare, queer and trans people of color in media, campus violence, immigration, incarceration, and even women in online game development.
Is abortion that secure? Hardly.
Amanda Marcotte blames the “anti-choice movement’s relentless propaganda about ‘abortion regret'” and the “ever-misogynistic gossip press” for a stigma against abortion that just won’t die.
Marcotte needs to talk to her own, for instance, Michael Odenthal of Highbrow Magazine.
Odenthal just wrote a laudibly pro-abortion piece (“Conservative America’s dangerous war on abortion”) wherein he promoted the a-word 21 times, except, strangely, within the three paragraphs where he sympathetically told the story of a now incarcerated Pennsylvania mother who illegally ordered pills online to “terminate” her pregnant 16-yr-old daughter’s “pregnancy,” which landed the hemorrhaging girl in the hospital.
“The daughter had a miscarriage,” wrote Odenthal, “as the pills were intended to induce.”
Um, no. The daughter had an abortion. Why not say it straight? Because in this case the a-word doesn’t play well?
Mixed messaging from abortion advocates, often subconscious, betrays the reality they may not even realize they know… this because abortion stigma is inborn, pardon the pun.
Abortion is unnatural. Abortion is violent. It is inherently abhorrent to kill one’s own offspring.
The fact is, abortion stigma will never die… simply because of that which does.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.