The Daily Wire reports about a sickening propaganda video released late last week. The clip features radical feminist and “Shout Your Abortion” founder Amelia Bonow extolling the wonders of abortion to a group of children. Bonow sits with a series of visibly uncomfortable kids and boasts about the time when she made the decision to kill her own child.
She describes the “procedure” in childish, anti-scientific language, and awkwardly papers over the violent reality of the act. Bonow says that abortion involves “sucking out the pregnancy” with a “straw.” She says it’s important that women have this right because she should not be forced to “create life,” which of course is a misnomer because abortion wouldn’t be necessary if not for the fact that life has already been created. In her case, the life was created when she, as she admits to the children who’ve been roped into this spectacle, chose to have sex without contraception. One astute young man speculates that her behavior may have been, perhaps, “reckless.” Bonow’s response to this charge is considerably less astute.
“Um, I mean, I don’t, I wouldn’t really say that I was being reckless,” she stammers. “Mistakes happen, and, and, sometimes you just don’t do that in the moment. You know what I mean?”
“I don’t know,” the child answers, aptly.
But the most revealing part of the segment is Bonow’s attempt to compare abortion to a more legitimate medical procedure: “It was like a crappy dentist appointment or something. It was just like, ‘Ah this is, like, a body thing that’s kind of uncomfortable,’ but then it was over and I felt, like, really just grateful that I wasn’t pregnant anymore.”
We’ll leave aside the fact that this video features an adult talking to middle schoolers and somehow the latter group is by far the most eloquent and well-spoken. The really interesting thing is that Bonow wants the kids, and the rest of society, to see abortion as nothing more than a “crappy dentist appointment,” yet, conspicuously, she never bothered to create a “Shout Your Dental Procedure” movement. And, though I haven’t checked, I’m guessing she has never been filmed explaining root canals to 12-year-olds. Abortion is like a dentist appointment, she claims, but she only goes around frantically trying to justify the former. Why is that?
Well, the simplest explanation probably applies here: feminists brag about their abortions and not their dental appointments because abortion is, it turns out, nothing at all like a dental appointment. And they know it. For all the rhetoric, for all the obfuscation, for all the euphemistic language, they know, deep down, that abortion is different. Abortion is serious. Abortion is violent and dirty and shameful. They know all of this, it doesn’t actually need to be explained to them. They are not “shouting their abortion” to us. They shout their abortions to themselves.
Replace those children with mirrors and you get a better idea of the psychology at work. Bonow is talking to herself. The kids are just props, sounding boards meant to sit silently and let this desperate woman bounce her own thoughts back to herself. But she isn’t fooling herself. And she isn’t fooling us. She’s hardly even fooling the kids. That’s how pathetic the whole scene really is.
It is a generally reliable rule that if you are offering unsolicited justifications for a personal choice, it means you are far from confident in that choice. This explains why feminists are always justifying their abortions but parents rarely go around justifying their decision to have kids. Parents talk about parenting. They might even complain about parenting. Or they might proclaim the joys of parenting. But they aren’t going to constantly defend the fact that they had kids in the first place. That’s because they know it was the right choice. They don’t need to convince anyone, least of all themselves. Even when parenting is challenging, it still fits. It makes sense. It offers a certain completion and wholeness to your life. The rightness of parenting is so self-evident that you couldn’t explain it or rationalize it if you tried.
Abortion is different. Abortion leaves you with a feeling of incompletion, emptiness, disjointedness. It is a thing that you constantly need to explain to yourself. Remove the exclamation mark from every declarative pro-abortion statement made by a feminist and replace it with a question mark, and then you’ll understand what they’re really saying. Bonow and company may shout “Abortion is good! Abortion is right! I’m happy about my abortion!” But what they mean is: “Abortion is good? Abortion is right? I’m happy about my abortion?”
“Yes,” they assure themselves. But they do not believe their own answer. So they shout all the louder, hoping to drown the thought that this is all a lie, and they have done something terrible and permanent.