Explaining why she left the pro-life movement, a writer on Medium recently asserted, “There are only two sides to this debate: you can be for women, or against them.” The false dichotomy between caring for women and protecting life is often held up as an argument against the pro-life movement. If pro-lifers really cared about women in difficult circumstances they would support abortion, the argument goes. Anyone who doesn’t is clearly unfeeling, calloused, and anti-woman. But this reasoning not only pits women against their children unnecessarily, it also fails to understand the true nature of compassion. Far from being an act of kindness, holding up abortion as the best or only option for a woman facing unplanned pregnancy is an incredibly harmful response to both women and children.
Protecting life in the womb and showing compassion for women can only be pitted against each other by telling a partial story. The argument that opposition to abortion is at odds with caring for women in difficult circumstances ignores the fact that, according to a national study, 64% of the women who have undergone abortion say that they felt pressured to do so, and 65% of those women showed signs of trauma. This is not kindness, but the enablement of coercion and abuse.
Consider also the countless women who experience depression and PTSD after abortions while the abortion industry insists that there's no such thing as abortion regret, or the women who are injured and in some cases even die as a result of the unsafe and irresponsible practices of abortion facilities. There is nothing compassionate about the way the abortion industry silences these women, denies them support, and enables the people in their lives who may be manipulating, coercing, or abusing them.
Many abortion-minded women really do feel like they have no choice. As one pro-life writer put it, a woman “wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.” But it’s incredibly cruel to tell a woman “You’re right. You’re trapped. There is nothing you can do and no one will be there for you, so of course you should get an abortion.” In what other circumstances would we apply this line of reasoning and call it kindness? Imagine someone saying to a woman in an abusive situation, “I know you feel like you can’t escape this relationship. You’re probably right that no one will ever be there for you—maybe try locking yourself in the bathroom next time he threatens you.” Or to someone in a season of financial difficulty, “You’re right. You’re never getting out of this situation. You might as well start the vicious cycle of payday loans now, it’s not like anyone else will help you.” Most people would rightly recognize that these responses are calloused, wrong, and outright irresponsible. If it’s wrong to respond to someone’s feeling of desperation by affirming the lies that they are tempted to believe when they are facing abuse or financial hardship, how is it acceptable to affirm the lies that bombard women facing unplanned pregnancy? And yet, this exactly what abortion advocates do in the name of compassion.
Finally, we must keep in mind that there is a difference between compassion and scapegoating. The abortion industry engages in the latter. True compassion does not alleviate one person’s suffering by causing direct harm to someone else. That’s simply picking a different victim—in this case, a defenseless child.
When it comes down to it, no amount of rhetoric will change the fact that abortion is wrong regardless of the situation, and there will always be awful situations that make people feel like they have no other choice. The question is how we as a culture will respond to women who feel like they need abortion. Will we say to them, "You're right, it's an awful choice, but you have no other options" or will we say, "You're right, it's an awful choice, and you don't have to do this." A society that treats compassion as a zero-sum game and assumes that caring for women is necessarily at odds with protecting unborn children will hold up abortion as the best or only option, but a society that refuses to accept a version of “compassion” that causes direct harm to another person will only accept solutions that care for both mother and child and will work relentlessly to build a culture where women receive true compassion and the lives of the unborn are cherished.
