Abortion activists like to come up with all kinds of heart-wrenching reasons that women have abortions: because their health is in danger, their baby has a severe abnormality, or they’ve been raped. Maybe they’re a single mother who is struggling to get by and feels she can’t handle having another baby. There are a variety of ways they justify abortion. But what they never mention is women who choose to have an abortion for complete and utter convenience.
Kelly Fitzgerald wrote an article for Ravishly, a pro-abortion feminist website, about her decision to have an abortion. Fitzgerald said that she moved to Mexico from Pennsylvania in 2009, and was “living the dream.” She was partying nonstop, drinking and using drugs, skipping work, and having herself a grand old time. It was in 2012 that she met Fernando, the man who would become her fiance, and the father of her children. After he moved in with her, she stopped using birth control. She writes:
We still drank heavily on the weekends and there were times we were reckless with using protection during sex. I had stopped taking oral birth control when I first met Fer because it was causing my face to develop brownish patches (a condition called melasma).
Unsurprisingly, she got pregnant. She tried taking Plan B, but it didn’t work.
I purchased a pregnancy test and took it alone in my apartment. It quickly revealed what I had feared most: I was pregnant. Fernando came over to the apartment, and we cried together. I screamed, cried, clenched my fists, and cursed myself.
What was I going to do now? How could this have happened?
Well, it could have happened because they had sex. It’s a very expected outcome. Despite her misgivings, she briefly considered having the baby. Her boyfriend, she explained, would have been supportive.
“My rational side answered, ‘Are you f*cking kidding me?’ You can barely take care of yourself,” she writes. “You have a job making just enough money to support yourself living in Mexico and that’s it. Plus, you’ll have to stop drinking and you’re not going to do that.”
Well, there’s a truly noble reason to have an abortion. It really tugs at your heartstrings, doesn’t it? A party girl has unprotected sex with her boyfriend and gets pregnant, so she has an abortion so she can keep on drinking and partying. Planned Parenthood should use her in their ads.
When Fitzgerald went to see her gynecologist, the visit was “traumatizing”, because he did an ultrasound and showed her what her baby looked like. Her boyfriend then went with her to get an illegal abortion, where she was given anesthesia and underwent an aspiration abortion.
She calls her abortion the best decision she could have made and the turning point in her life. Five months later, she stopped drinking and she is now engaged to that same man who said he would have supported her if she had chosen to have the baby.
Without my abortion, I don’t know if I would have gotten sober at all, as it showed me how out-of-control my life was in the midst of plentiful drugs and alcohol. Without my abortion, I don’t think I would have the same loving, healthy, and drama-free relationship I have today with my fiancé. I don’t think I would be a happy, self-confident 30-year-old woman with a successful writing career.
So the only way for her to get clean and become successful was by killing her baby? Her baby, whom she referred to as a “ball of cells”, already had a heartbeat, measurable brain waves, and his or her own DNA. Fitzgerald doesn’t say how far along she was, yet by 10 weeks, female preborn babies already have their own ovaries and wombs. Preborn babies in the first trimester have fingerprints and fingernails. Their humanity is inescapable, which is likely why Fitzgerald said she was haunted by the ultrasound image for over a year.
The saddest thing is that she uses her abortion as the reason she got clean when what actually clued her in on the problems with her lifestyle wasn’t her abortion. It was her pregnancy — her baby.
Fitzgerald didn’t need an abortion. She needed help.
Blogger Calah Alexander, who was addicted to crystal meth when she became pregnant, points out that most people will tell drug-addicted women in crisis pregnancies that they must have an abortion. And she questions what that means:
[T]hink of the message we’re sending those women.
You can’t do this. You are too weak to resist. You’re not a mother, you’re unfit to be a mother, we know you won’t make sacrifices for your child. Better for the child to not live at all than to be abandoned by a drug-addled mother. After all, what kind of life will she have. The daughter of an addict.
Alexander credits her daughter with saving her life. It was her love for her daughter that helped Alexander get clean. Instead of being told there was no hope, she was given love, compassion, and support from everyone around her. It’s sad that Fitzgerald had the opposite outlook; that the only path she saw for herself was the cruelty and pain of abortion. She and her baby deserved better.
