The same week that actress Anne Hathaway advocated for mercy killing unborn babies on “The View,” declaring that this is “not a moral conversation about abortion,” but “a practical conversation about women’s rights, and by the way human rights, because women’s rights are human rights,” NPR aired a troubling audio clip of a mother undergoing an abortion.
And not just any abortion, but one at 11 weeks. At that point, babies already have fingerprints and facial expressions and can suck their thumbs. Their sex is evident on an ultrasound, their vocal cords are present, and they begin to yawn.
“Most patients are partially awake during the procedures,” the National Public Radio broadcaster narrates over the sounds of hospital instruments clattering. “They get IV medication for pain and anxiety, the lights are dimmed, there’s soothing music. It actually feels a lot like a childbirth — the medical gown, your bare legs in stirrups, and a person next to you saying, ‘You can do this.’”
Except it’s nothing like childbirth. Human beings know this not only in our minds but in our souls, whether we are willing to acknowledge it outwardly. It’s actually the exact opposite of childbirth. At its brutal core, it is child sacrifice at the altar of human ambition, fear, deception, greed, faux altruism, and selfishness, and no medical gown or stirrups or death-dealing doula can mask that.
“You’re going to hear this machine turn on now, OK? It makes a loud noise,” the abortionist can be heard in the broadcast, followed by the menacing sound of a vacuum roaring awake but failing to fully drown out the mother’s moaning and crying.
“And then within just a couple of minutes, it’s over,” the narrator concludes.
But it’s not over, not for that woman on the table, a mother of one — or two if you count the child whose life she snuffed out — not for our sick country, and not for the humanness and maternalism of women.
Americans have been taken by a great many lies about women. They’ve believed that value derives from productivity and that any discrepancy in pay or title denotes gross unfairness. They’ve believed that sex is inconsequential and modesty is unnecessary, giving up their agency in their sexual encounters while purporting to do the opposite. They’ve believed that men can become women, that some women have male reproductive systems, and that in order to be the best kinds of women, they must make themselves the most like men. And, among a slew of other falsehoods, they’ve believed that motherhood is dispensable.
To too many women, who have been endowed with the remarkable and unique ability to create and incubate new human life and the maternal instincts to protect and nurture that life into maturity, pregnancy and birth-giving are burdensome. Like the preborn life inside the NPR subject, motherhood is something to be torn apart, sucked away, and discarded.
But while women have convinced themselves that taking the life of an innocent person can be “mercy,” a “human right,” or a moral positive, they cannot evade their imago Dei. Extinguishing a human life cannot do the same to our created order, to the motherhood-sized chasm in each woman’s life that, once realized, can literally cultivate the next generation. In suctioning out mothers’ wombs, we really hollow out their souls.
Though modern ultrasound technology, patient persuasion, and individual pregnancy experiences have convinced many women of the sanctity of unborn life, nothing short of spiritual awakening can truly mend broken women and heal their souls. But thanks to the demise of Roe v. Wade, pro-life Americans get a fresh start, a spot at the starting line, to battle for a culture that sees abortion for the evil stain that it is and turns away from it. To that end, Nov. 8 presents not only an opportunity by a moral imperative to elect steadfast representatives who not only share that view but fight for it.
Though utterly gut-wrenching, clips such as the NPR abortion segment can serve that goal unintentionally too. Much like President Joe Biden admitting that abortion kills a “child,” every time the media and other pro-abortion Americans show the barbarism for what it really is, it’s an opportunity. A wolf is an awful lot easier to spot when it isn’t wearing sheep’s clothing.
