How a pro-choice mom explains abortion to her daughter
[This article is a transcript of “Talking with children about abortion” courtesy of volunteer Ben Tomlin. If you’re interested in volunteering to transcribe more of our content, please complete our volunteer survey.]
My 11 year old daughter asked me what an abortion was.
Dr. Vicki Chan, “Doctor Explaining Abortion to Her 11 Year Old Kid“
This is a really interesting video. I recommend that you go watch the whole thing, and the way I’m making my response won’t let me stitch it so you can find it, so if you go to her TikTok channel, it’s @VickiChanMD. She uploaded it October 10th of 2024 if you want to see the whole thing.
I asked her what did she think it was, what had she heard? ‘Abortion is killing babies.’
Dr. Vicki Chan
I took special interest because she’s talking to her 11-year-old daughter and to a lesser extent her 8-year-old son about what abortion is, and I have kids around those ages, and I have talked to my oldest daughter about what abortion is, so it was interesting to see how a pro-choice mom explains it.
To which I responded, ‘you know, I’ve heard that, but the way I think about it is that it’s when someone is pregnant and doesn’t want to be pregnant anymore.’
Dr. Vicki Chan
I actually said something kind of similar to my daughter.
I intend to raise my kids to understand the pro-life perspective, but it’s important to me that they reasonably understand the pro-choice perspective, too. I don’t want them to grow up, get out of the house, and then that’s the first time they ever hear a reasonable pro-choice argument and it shakes their perspective. I want them to know what pro-choice people think and why, and then I want them to know why I disagree.
That means the first time that I was explaining abortion to my oldest daughter, I told her that what happens is there are women who are pregnant in situations where they really do not want to be. Pregnancy is very serious. It can be very intimidating, and people really want to make sure they have a lot of support to do it, and sometimes women feel like they are not ready to be pregnant, they aren’t ready to have a baby. I told her that and then I told her that sometimes those women choose instead to get an abortion, which is usually when they have a doctor end their pregnancy in a way that the baby dies.
She had more questions: ‘How could a pregnancy be bad? How could a baby be bad?’
Dr. Vicki Chan
Yeah, my daughter was the same way: “How could anybody do that? How could you ever do something that would kill your baby?”
Sometimes being pregnant is not healthy for the mom. Sometimes the baby is sick and they have to end the pregnancy. Sometimes the mom can’t have a baby. She doesn’t have money. She doesn’t have a home …
Dr. Vicki Chan
This is remarkably similar to the conversation I had with my daughter. I told her that sometimes it can be dangerous, most of the time it’s not, but sometimes women really feel like it is not the right time. Maybe the man in their life is not a very good partner or maybe they feel like they don’t have enough money. I said a lot of these similar things.
… and she’s like, ‘That’s really sad.’ It is. It is really sad.
Dr. Vicki Chan
It is extremely sad, and I appreciate that you acknowledge that because I spend a lot of time talking to a lot of different kinds of people who defend abortion, and there are a lot of people who try to argue that it’s not actually sad at all, or at least it doesn’t have to be, and that it’s kind of a neutral thing, your mileage may vary, it just depends on your personal perspective.
I find that usually those kinds of people, the kinds of people defending abortion as if it’s a neutral thing, they really struggle to use words like “baby” or “child” or “human.” They really struggle to acknowledge that embryos and fetuses are biologically humans, and they struggle to acknowledge that abortion causes them to die. I think you have to deny a lot of fairly obvious truths to sanitize abortion.
Your take here, Dr. Chan, wasn’t quite like that. I really appreciate the relationship you seem to have with your kids and how you’re trying to walk them through it, and I appreciate your empathy and your compassion for the women in these situations.
But you still did this:
Sometimes moms have to make the tough decision not to be pregnant anymore.
Dr. Vicki Chan
Yeah, she doesn’t want to be pregnant anymore, that’s true, but that’s not why abortion is controversial. I mean there are lots and lots of people who don’t want to be pregnant anymore and end their pregnancies by giving birth to live children, and that’s not extraordinarily controversial.
Abortion isn’t this huge intractable fight because it ends a pregnancy. Abortion is an issue because it ends a life. (tweet this)
That is the spirit and the nature of your daughter’s initial question when she asked you if it’s killing babies. And I know it’s just TikTok and you can’t fit everything in here, but you didn’t really give her a yes or no on that, right?
You said it’s about when someone is pregnant and doesn’t want to be pregnant anymore. You said it’s about moms deciding to not be pregnant anymore. Why do you phrase it like that?
It’s true, but it’s such an incomplete picture. It’s about people who want to end a pregnancy in a situation where the other human being will die. In some cases, it’s even possible that they could have induced labor for a very premature infant to survive, and in those, albeit comparatively rare, cases instead they inject feticide into the child’s heart to make sure they don’t survive.
That is not just about ending a pregnancy, that’s about making sure you don’t have a live child. That’s what abortion is about.
That’s why you yourself mentioned situations where she might end the pregnancy because she doesn’t have a home or she doesn’t have enough money. That is not just about saying, “I can’t be pregnant right now because I don’t have enough money.” That’s about saying, “I can’t take care of a live baby right now because I don’t have enough money,” and the purpose of abortion is to prevent the existence of a living newborn.
I don’t know. She will probably have more questions for me later.
Dr. Vicki Chan
I appreciate your empathy. I appreciate your motivations. I appreciate the way that you are explaining to parents how to have these difficult conversations. I appreciate all of those things, but I do wish that you would be a little bit more direct about it. I think that if you believe it’s justified, you should be able to acknowledge what you’re really talking about.
And you’re not talking about just ending a pregnancy; you’re talking about killing a human being. (tweet this)
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