Not too long ago, I posted this, a link to a review I wrote about the book Giving Sorrow Words. In that review, I mentioned an Australian columnist, Evelyn Tsitas, who, in our global village read what I wrote and wrote a rebuttal:
That acceptance with their decision is something the women in Giving Sorrow Words do not have. Why? Because they obviously wanted the baby, but lacked the courage of their convictions and now want to blame others for their regret. Women who really want the baby they are carrying will do anything to keep it. Women in a high-risk pregnancy require frequent hospitalisation, invasive tests, months of bed rest, painful daily injections – the list goes on. Birth is also a risky business for them. …
So I have no time for the women who can’t get over their abortions. They obviously didn’t want to have a termination in the first place. While I feel sorry for them, I also refuse to buy into the pro-life line that every abortion will cause grief.
Ignoring the callous, staccato tone of her piece, I will say that to a very small extent I agree with her. Women ought to be stronger and stick to their guns. I wish many more were able to do that. But she entirely missed my point, which is this: Our culture talks about abortion as being easy and valid. And so it is absolutely no surprise that many women go against their impulse to keep a baby and have an abortion instead. The women chronicled in the book Giving Sorrow Words are women who learned the very hard way that oftentimes, not every time, but oftentimes, that simply isn’t true. And they have suffered as a result.
That’s why I compared having an abortion to trying drugs. Not everyone will become an addict. But many will, and it’s a reasonable outcome. When we talk about drugs, we understand that addiction and all the harms that come from that is a reasonable outcome. And thus we have campaigns against drugs: Just Say No. When we talk about abortion we talk about nice, comforting concepts like “choice,” and it’s deceptive.
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Here’s the point that I think Evelyn Tsitas is missing. Why do women end up having unwanted abortions? If abortion is about “choice,” and these women really wanted their babies, why wasn’t their choice to give birth supported? Rather than attacking pro-lifers, or blaming women for not being strong enough, Tsitas should be calling out those who failed to support these women and allowed or actively participated in their unwanted abortions. This includes the abortion industry and abortion advocates who oppose things like screening for coercion and making sure women are given adequate resources and information before abortion. As Melinda Tankard Reist noted in the book: “Concealing information relevant to a woman’s decision-making and future health should be recognized as an act of coercion. Deceptive information presented as fact; for example, that post-abortion trauma is a “myth,” also acts coercively on a client. If a woman chooses abortion without having been apprised of the facts about potential harm and suffering, she has not chosen freely: the decision-making process process has been rendered defective.” (p. 167)