Three years ago, abortion activist Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote a shocking piece for Salon where she argued that abortion should be legal even though it does, in fact, kill a human being.
“So what if abortion ends life?” Williams’ headline read in 2013. “I believe that life starts at conception. And it’s never stopped me from being pro-choice.”
She concluded by arguing that an unborn baby is “a life worth sacrificing.” Williams admitted that she puts “the life of the mother over the life of a fetus every single time.”
Williams’ piece was shocking at the time; but three years later, it has become much more common for abortion supporters to admit that abortions do destroy living human beings, The Federalist’s James Silberman pointed out.
Two recent interviews with pro-abortion Democrat Hillary Clinton are examples of abortion activists’ new comfort with admitting that unborn babies are living human beings.
“The unborn person has no constitutional rights,” Clinton told CNN earlier this year.
In April, Clinton made a similar statement on The View when she said she supports Roe v. Wade, which denies all constitutional rights to a child up until the moment of birth. The studio crowd cheered in the background as Clinton made her statement.
Another example is the CEO of one of England’s biggest abortion chains. This summer, British Pregnancy Advisory Services CEO Ann Furedi also admitted that abortion kills a life.
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“Abortion may be an act of killing – but it kills a being that has no sense of life or death, and no awareness of itself as distinct from others,” Furedi said.
Though these admissions may shock some people, they really are not saying anything new. Similar language was used to defend slavery in America and the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, Silberman wrote. In each of these situations, supporters argued that certain groups of people essentially were second-class human beings whose lives were “worth sacrificing” for the good of the first-class humans.
“Abortion simply perpetuates the human tradition of putting personal ambitions and desires before others’ lives,” Silberman wrote.
He continued:
In the 1860 presidential election, Democratic nominee Stephen Douglas argued that, regardless of the morality of slavery or the humanity of black people, it would be wrong to force citizens to accept black people as fully human. He said that despite personal opposition to the practice, state territories should decide for themselves whether slavery would be legal.
He was making the “pro-choice” argument for slavery just as today’s abortion supporters make the “pro-choice” argument for abortion. To Douglas, the slave trader, and the abortion lobby, the value of a human life is subservient to personal freedom. The inherent worth of a human being can be negotiated based on preference and circumstance. Just as the slave’s rights to life and liberty were worth sacrificing in order to provide slave-traders a wealthy, slothful lifestyle, today’s abortion supporters believe the preborn are worth sacrificing so they can maintain their promiscuous, self-centered lifestyle.
Silberman went on to explain the dangerous implications of such arguments: “It is crucially important that every unborn human being can claim his or her inalienable, natural rights to life and liberty. If instead the value of an unborn human life is up for interpretation, as the Left claims, then the value of all our lives is up for interpretation.”
The true test of abortion activists’ new approach, however, is inside of abortion facilities. It’s difficult to imagine that most abortion center staff are admitting to patients that an abortion kills a life. Practically, the abortion industry knows it suffers when women learn about the humanity of their unborn child. Studies have found that women who see an ultrasound image of their unborn baby are more likely to choose life.
And the abortion industry still fights vigorously against legislation that requires them to give women the opportunity to see their baby on an ultrasound or scientific evidence about their baby’s life in the womb.
These attempts to normalize abortion by admitting that it destroys a life may appeal to a small audience, but they are not practical for the abortion industry. Hopefully, it will backfire and more women will recognize that their unborn babies are human beings who deserve the same right to life that they have.
