This young girl is in tears over how attached she is to the zygote, but somehow manages to justify her decision to abort it extremely easily (“everyone is telling me that being a mom will suck at first but then it will be wonderful. What if it’s not? I want to do something I enjoy for a change, something for me!”). Attached to the zygote? But able to abort? Really? Maybe her story is a good example of why women experience poor mental health as the result of an abortion.
Once I came to the decision to terminate the pregnancy, so much of the guilt and sadness I’d been feeling melted away. …In some ways, I feel like I’ve given up. I didn’t want to go down without a fight, I wanted to be a tough mother who braved the world for her child.
Now I was raised by tough and courageous parents, who moved across the ocean to escape an immoral regime. Maybe that’s why I find I’m often short on the sympathy file. If you claim to want to do the right thing, then just do it. Don’t write long meandering tracts on how you wanted to but couldn’t possibly be brave. (The article also points out she was offered every help in the book.)
You know what I’m sorry about? (Because I’m not feeling sympathy for her right now, to be sure.) I’m sorry a person can be so spineless as to kill her child in favour of a Masters degree. And then claim “it was the right thing to do” to the nodding affirmation of New York Times types.
by 
“I’m stuck in the middle — too financially stable to qualify for aid, grants, or scholarships [or WIC/food stamps], but still too poor to successfully raise a child and go to school.”
What BS! She must be quite financially stable indeed if she doesn’t even qualify for WIC. Young women in far worse situations have had babies and gotten advanced degrees. She wants to be a “tough mother who braved the world for her child”? Well, she’s a mother already. This is the part where she should show how tough she is by protecting her child, not killing it.
If she doesn’t want to make the effort, well, that’s “choice” for you, but like Andrea I find it hard to be sympathetic.
And this is the second PWPL article posted in the past couple of days in which a woman writes about being encouraged by her OWN MOTHER to have an abortion. I know this happens all the time, but I just don’t get it. It was getting pregnant and having my babies that made me pro-life. How can a woman encourage her daughter to kill her grandchild?
Also, wouldn’t you kind of wonder how you managed to get here, if your mother is pro-abortion?
I read some of the comments below the story and I shouldn’t have – they were all congratulating the woman on making “the right decision”. One woman even chimed in that she had just spent thousands of dollars on fertility procedures and terminated the resulting child because he or she had Down’s.
How did this happen? We so seemlessly have already entered the age of designer children and unapologetic eugenics.
Her comment that she could not give her child up for adoption, but could kill it is just so incredibly selfish. And then to bring up someone else’s children in Africa not getting a mosquito net because she was not in her Master’s program? Well, let’s just abort all the children in Africa – there lives aren’t worth living anyways right? That is the logical conclusion. If being the child of a busy single career mom is not worth living, certainly life in malaria-stricken poverty isn’t.
And why is the official feminist movement not focussed on making the world a more friendly place for pregnant women? Why can’t colleges defer admittance to a program for a year if a woman is pregnant? Isn’t this the ultimate example of the “Patriarchy”?
One thing I love about PEI is that this issue is very much on the forefront. Our local paper features letters on abortion at least weekly – which are overwhelmingly pro-life. At our March for Life there were Liberal and PC MLAs present. There is no abortion services at all here and if you want to make that choice you must contemplate it during your travel and then after making your case to a panel of doctors in NB (unless you can afford to further enrich Mr. Morgentaler). I know of so many college-aged women (acquaintances) who got unexpectedly pregant during university and kept the baby. All are very left-wing by my standards.
The people who believe there is no life after an unexpected pregnancy, no reasonable way someone could lead a chaste life until marriage, no cure for diseases without embryonic stem cell research, and no way to have a parent at home to raise their child or otherwise pay for daycare themselves without government help, all have something in common:
They are without hope, and have given up even trying.
I saw that article when it came out. The thing is that as far as I could tell she was looking for an excuse to not have to deal with being pregnant or a baby. People offered her every resource a young single mother could ask for (so she could keep her baby). She must be pretty well off to not qualify for any kind of aid or assistance. She doesn’t want to put her child up for adoption. She wants to fight for her child but not give them to a family who would love and raise that baby and basically give them the life she claims she can’t. It was very ironic that a weight had been lifted once she decided to kill her child. Shouldn’t killing your child that you claim to be attached to cause some sort of guilt or pain? I am very disappointed that people practically applauded her for killing her child. It would have been hard to be a mother and a grad student. It would have been hard to give her baby up. But let’s face it contrary to the feel good society we’ve tried to make parenting is hard. Life is hard. There is no perfect time or perfect way. She didn’t think about that little life inside her. I don’t feel sorry for her at all. Her quick fix feel good solution is appalling.
The article, and especially its comments are revealing as to how a climate is created where women are EXPECTED to abort when it is inconvenient to a boss, or in this case, the men and women running a Masters Program.
This creates a climate where it becomes a NORM to discriminate against pregnant women and new mothers, because, if they had any sense at all, they would put their career ahead of their zygotes.
This is where so many individual decisions create of climate of rampant discrimination, justify it, and grow it. And women, as well as the future generation, are crushed beneath the wheels of this expectation. And this is seen, by our secular society, to be as it should be.
It is going to take as much hard work, and as much individual participation, to turn this around as it took to put it in place. Good, hard, “damn the torpedos and full steam ahead” activism. Don’t be complacent in PEI.
How about this choice quote:
“They also warned me that professors aren’t just tough, they can be especially harsh to the pregnant women in the program. ”
True feminism hasn’t quite triumphed yet, has it?
What a sad, selfish decision that young woman has made.
I’m shocked that she considers the father as “stepping up”, but then tells us that he is encouraging abortion. Huh?
this NY times piece was an exercise in rampant rationalization.
It’s a wonder this woman was able to get admitted to a grad program, given her poor reasoning ability.
It’s not uncommon to see mothers who have aborted encourage daughters to do the same.
Go check out the “I am Dr. Tiller” website. Many of the posters there are post-abortive women working in the abortion industry.
BTW, nice blog Andrea!
I just want to say thanks for this interesting thread about ProWomanProLife » Running low in the sympathy department! Regards, Alexia Berater