Liberal Salon.com writer JJ Keith recently wrote a piece with the headline —“My miscarriages made me question being pro-choice: I was devastated when I lost my pregnancies, and I wondered: Does grieving this way mean abortion is wrong?”
The piece is very thought-provoking and has the writer admitting:
“It doesn’t make any sense to me, at least not intellectually, but I feel like I have five children — two born and three who were not born, which is a point-of-view that is hard to reconcile with being pro-choice.”
“Once I finally did give birth to a real live baby, I was surprised to learn that pushing out a fully formed human is only marginally more painful than ejecting a clump of cells the size of a pencil eraser. How is it that babies are born in hospitals surrounded by nurses offering ice chips while never-to-be-borns are leaked out in OB-GYN waiting rooms, on bathroom floors and in the gussets of soon-to-be-trashed underwear, only very rarely with any kind of support other than a prescription for Tylenol with codeine. That hardly seems fair. There should be ice chips for everybody.”
Dave Andrusko of the National Right to Life Committee noticed the piece and responded to it.
Keith had three miscarriages before she carried two pregnancies to term—a preschool son and daughter whom she obviously loves and adores.
It won’t be along strictly party lines–pro-lifers versus pro-abortionist—that explains why one person reads her Salon essay differently from another. She is firmly pro-choice but she appears to be making a good faith attempt to make sense of her ideology in the face of how much she mourns those lost children.
But there are more than a few casually dismissive comments made about the babies she miscarried. One person will read that as clear evidence Keith does not really value prenatal life. I don’t. I think it’s as much a defense mechanism as it is to demonstrate solidarity with pro-abortionists or to under-appreciate unborn children.
I read it to say that even though the child early in pregnancy is tiny, the loss of him or her is a big, BIG deal.
To be sure, later she makes the kind of off-putting remark that could tempt you to conclude she is insincere. Again, that’s not how I read Ms. Keith. She hurt, a lot, when she miscarried. To this day she doesn’t understand how people do not grasp the magnitude of a baby lost to a miscarriage. The loss to her—and to every woman?–is “substantial.”
