Huffington Post Associate Women’s Editor Jenavieve Hatch is baffled. But as is often the case when abortion advocates attack pro-lifers, what she identifies as “baffling logic” is perfectly logical to anyone not encumbered by the prejudices of abortionism.
On Monday, Hatch took aim at South Dakota State Representative Steven Haugaard, a Republican who has introduced legislation to criminalize abortions performed on any preborn child capable of feeling pain (defined at 13 weeks in the state), except for medical emergencies. Penalties (2 years in prison and/or a $4,000 fine) would only apply to the abortionist, not to the woman seeking an abortion. The bill has passed the state House and now must clear the state Senate.
All this is pretty straightforward. So what’s the “baffling” part of this so-called attack on “your bodily autonomy”? Hatch says:
One South Dakota State Representative has defended the state’s already intense anti-abortion legislation by saying that limiting access to the procedure is in no way an “attack on women” because, after all, “half of the abortions include the death of a girl” […]
Rep. Haugaard’s attempt to justify limiting access to abortion to protect women and girls may be a new low. After all, limiting abortion access directly affects women’s health. The sex of the fetus is irrelevant: abortions and access to them affect women, not men. Period.
Behold the moral arrogance and intellectual emptiness of pro-abortion apologetics: you can claim the “protector of women” mantle without even attempting to account for how your position kills millions of little girls. Sneering about “new lows” and ending the discussion by declaring “period” are all the support you need. So confident are you that your audience isn’t interested in real answers to substantive challenges, that you can go out of your way to highlight one and then not answer it.
In reality, of course, Haugaard’s point is so obviously valid and logical that it borders on tautology: of course something that kills females isn’t good for females. Of course denying girls the opportunity to grow up into women isn’t pro-woman. The most “pro-woman” spin that could be honestly given to abortion is that it benefits some females by sacrificing other females.
But then, it would be kind of difficult to sell bumper stickers that honest as “feminist.”
So contrary to Hatch’s sneering, the sex of the preborn child is not “irrelevant” by a long shot, not as long as her side insists on framing the abortion debate as a battle of the sexes. (Oh, and contrary to her foot-stomping insistence that abortions don’t affect men, “period,” why exactly do the deaths of preborn females and males not count as effects?)
Hatch attempts to distract from her make-believe insistence that prenatal lives don’t matter by citing a 2013 New York Times article about women turned away from abortion facilities, the heart of which is the infamous 2008 Turnaway Study by University of California associate professor Diana Greene Foster, a radical pro-abortion extremist. As many of our readers are aware, the study is notorious for a number of flaws, but ultimately failed to paint the harrowing picture pro-aborts hoped it would. As my colleague Adam Peters sums up:
She studied women who were turned away from abortion clinics and found that their “initial and subsequent levels of depressive symptoms were similar” to those who weren’t. And while she contended that the former group experienced higher anxiety levels, Foster found no difference between the two after six months.
She noted other problems, though. For example, Foster claims that those who couldn’t abort were three times more likely to be below the federal poverty line. I can’t say whether her findings are accurate, but it’s true that a lot of women just don’t feel ready to raise a baby. The good news? Plenty of people are.
Adam’s excellent piece goes on to detail the abundant support available to women facing unwanted or unintended pregnancies—support that propagandists like Hatch have to pretend doesn’t exist to bolster this line of attack. Further, LifeSiteNews’s Kirsten Andersen analyzed the original NYT piece at the time:
Here, from the mouth of one of the study’s authors, Diana Greene Foster, is the answer to the title question: “About 5 percent of the women, after they have had the baby, still wish they hadn’t. And the rest of them adjust” […]
Lang grudgingly admits that women who gave birth after being refused abortion do, in fact, report that they are happy with the way things turned out by a lopsided margin.
But, lamenting that someone might further clamp down on abortion, he quotes a bioethicist who accuses those women of lying to themselves and to society.
In the final analysis, the only “baffling logic” here is why abortion fans would be content with such ineffective advocacy for their cause.
