Simone Biles made history again this week at the 2024 Paris Olympics when she became the most decorated American gymnast ever. The 27-year-old’s record-breaking success on and off the mat, however, can’t simply be chalked up to talent and training but the pro-life path her family took to give her the best upbringing she could have.
Long before she became a globally celebrated champion, Biles was a neglected child who, after three years of enduring her biological mother’s drug and alcohol abuse, was transferred into the foster care system.
On paper, abortion activists would likely say that Biles was the perfect candidate for meeting her end in the womb. One of the most popular excuses radicals use to justify abortion is that children who are expected to be born into suffering due to suboptimal life circumstances, like Biles, or life-altering genetic conditions or birth defects are better off dead.
Biles’ biological mom was a struggling black woman, the type of woman abortion facilities like Planned Parenthood routinely target. Her struggles with addiction and a lack of involvement from her children’s father left the four young Biles kids, including Simone, suffering.
“There were times where you didn’t know what was going to happen … you didn’t know if there was going to be food on the table, you didn’t know if mother was coming back,” Biles said in her Netflix documentary “Simone Biles Rising.”
After three years in foster care, however, Biles’ biological grandfather Ronald and his wife Nellie adopted her and her sister.
“If not for my parents and adoption, I wouldn’t be here today,” Biles told “Today” co-anchor Hoda Kotb this week in front of the Eiffel Tower.
Better Off Dead?
The idea that the potential for suffering, something every single human is doomed to endure, should determine whether a baby gets to exercise her fundamental right to life simply because she is in the womb is shocking. Yet, it has fueled dozens of radical state ballot measures demanding abortion be legal through birth for women whose doctors claim their physical, mental, financial, or emotional situation puts their health at risk.
A chorus of corporate media articles insist, especially in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, that adoption “isn’t a replacement for abortion” because it allegedly comes with even more trauma than killing a baby via dismemberment or chemically-induced starvation does.
“Adoption is often just as traumatic as the right thinks abortion is, if not more so, as a woman has to relinquish not a lump of cells but a fully formed baby she has lived with for nine months,” Democrat strategist Elizabeth Spiers wrote in the New York Times in 2021, as the high bench considered its decision on Mississippi’s 15-week pro-life law.
Outlets complain that lifesaving abortion restrictions amount to “forced motherhood” often smear pro-lifers who support mothers giving their babies a chance at life outside the womb through adoption. The Washington Post also recently chided pro-lifers for encouraging the 91 percent of mothers who, when they weren’t pushed to end their child’s life, chose to raise their babies “in circumstances they would not otherwise choose.”
This lie is so pervasive that even happy adoptees like Biles have bought into it.
Yet, Biles still wouldn’t change a thing because she realizes that the chance to thrive is far better than being stripped of her shot to survive.
“I realize that my life could have turned out very differently,” Biles wrote in 2022. “I am so grateful for all of the support I have received throughout my journey, and it has empowered me to share my experiences so I can help be a voice for others who may be struggling.”
A Chance To Become A Champion
Yes, the foster system, like every other government-run institution, needs repair. And, yes, adoption is expensive and can carry the emotional scars that come with cutting the indisputable tether between kids and their biological parents. Without either, however, a one-of-a-kind athlete like Biles would have never made it to Rio, Tokyo, or Paris. In fact, she might not have made it out of the womb.
“I wonder what my life would be like if none of this happened. I want to know why my mother did what she did,” Biles wondered to Time in 2016. “But those aren’t questions for me because that was her lifestyle when I wasn’t even born. I have everything I need so there are no blanks left unfilled. I never felt I had questions or needed answers or had a part of me that was missing.”
Biles is who she is today because her mother chose life in the face of suffering, a family chose to foster her despite the system’s flaws, and her biological grandfather and his wife chose adoption despite the emotional and expensive side effects. There’s nothing more pro-life than that.
