Everyone loves someone who has had an abortion
[This article is a transcript of “Everyone loves someone who has had an abortion” courtesy of volunteer Ben Tomlin. If you’re interested in volunteering to transcribe more of our content, please complete our volunteer survey.]
This video is also available on TikTok.
Have you seen the pro-choice phrase, “Everyone loves someone who has had an abortion”? I love people who have had abortions. Some of them I know about, some of them I know I don’t know about. It doesn’t change that I’m going to work to try to stop abortion from happening, but it is important to keep in mind, especially when we are talking to strangers online and conversations can get very vitriolic and aggressive, that people come to their positions through sometimes very difficult experiences.
I had a video recently talking about how pro-life people often get to their positions through trauma, but the same is true for a lot of pro-choice people. And I can’t pretend to know what it’s like to be in circumstances that would make me want to choose an abortion, but I do know what it’s like to be in circumstances that make me want to believe that an embryo is an irrelevant clump of cells.
I’ve had two miscarriages. With the first one, I felt heartbreak. Just grief and heartbreak. The second one was a little bit different. I felt more angry and nihilistic maybe.
Maybe you’ve seen the pro-choice talking point that God is the biggest abortionist of all because so many fertilized eggs fail to implant or there are so many miscarriages even after implantation. I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in God, but I definitely thought a lot about the high rate of miscarriage.
There was a part of me that thought, if nature doesn’t care enough to keep these humans alive, then why should I care? It would be so much easier to believe that the little human beings that I lost were too underdeveloped to be morally significant, to be people, to be my children.
It would be so much easier to believe that until they had reached some later milestone, like, I don’t know, viability or some level of cognition, that they were just bodies waiting for minds or souls, if you believe in souls. But they weren’t anything yet, so I don’t need to be heartbroken or enraged. It’s not important.
I didn’t land there ultimately, at anger and nihilism, but I stood on the precipice of it, and even while I was going through it, I thought about how much easier that would be in some ways for me, and how much easier it probably is for a lot of people, whether it’s miscarriage or abortion. You don’t have to grieve, and you don’t have to think about how you lost something you can’t ever get back, because it’s not important.
I’m not presuming that’s how everyone who goes through miscarriage or abortion feels, or that that’s the thought process they go through, but I think a lot of people do, and I understand why.
What does that mean for how we handle the abortion debate? I don’t know. I’m going to keep talking about what I know and believe to be true, but I will try to do it keeping in mind where people are coming from and the variety of experiences that might have led them to this.
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