Woman Claims “I’m a Successful Mother and Lawyer Because I Had an Abortion”

National   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Jan 26, 2016   |   2:52PM   |   Washington, DC

Janice Mac Avoy makes a lot of assumptions about what her life would have been like if she had not aborted her first child.

“If I had been forced to raise a child 35 years ago, I could not have put myself through college and Columbia Law School. I could not have gotten a job at a prestigious law firm and risen through the ranks to become a partner. I would not have met my husband and given birth to two amazing children in my late 30s when I was financially and emotionally ready to raise them,” The Washington Post columnist wrote Monday.

Mac Avoy said she grew up in a poor home where women for three generations before her had become pregnant before age 18. Mac Avoy said she was determined to break the cycle of poverty and teen pregnancy. She worked hard, won a college scholarship and set a goal to become a lawyer. But just before she graduate from high school (the first in her family), she learned that she was pregnant. She had a friend drive her to a Planned Parenthood where she aborted her unborn baby.

After 35 years, Mac Avoy said she has never regretted her abortion. She recently became one of a group of abortion activists who submitted their abortion stories to the U.S. Supreme Court. The group of 113 pro-abortion lawyers is asking the high court to strike down a Texas law credited with saving more than 10,000 unborn babies.

“To the world, I am an attorney who had an abortion, and, to myself, I am an attorney because I had an abortion,” Mac Avoy wrote in the brief to the Supreme Court. She said her 17-year-old daughter and 83-year-old mother-in-law encouraged her to tell her abortion story.

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The Supreme Court announced in November that it will hear the lawsuit brought by abortion businesses against the law, which is responsible for closing abortion clinics that could not guarantee they could protect the health of Texas women. The case will be heard by the nine justices on March 2, and a ruling is expected by the end of June.

“It is critical that we share with the court what abortion means to us: the ability to break the cycle of poverty and teenage motherhood, to escape abusive relationships, to achieve higher education and to preserve our health,” Mac Avoy wrote.

Except, pro-lifers argue, that those situations can be solved without killing an unborn baby. Pro-lifers argue that abortion advocates limit women and their strength when they claim that women need to abort their unborn child to achieve their goals. They point to many women who have chosen life for their unborn babies and overcome obstacles.

In the Texas law case, pro-life groups say the abortion industry has money, not women’s interests, at heart. The law helps women and their unborn babies by requiring abortion facilities to meet basic health and safety standards.

“The abortion industry doesn’t like these laws because abortion clinics would be forced to spend money to meet basic health and safety standards” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “For them, this isn’t about ‘protecting’ the women they purport to help, it’s about preserving their cash flow.”

“If an abortionist closes up because he can’t meet these most basic medical standards, that’s a good thing for the mothers who would be targeted and the unborn children who would be killed,” said Tobias.

The legislation, House Bill 2 (HB2), requires abortion facilities to meet the same safety standards of other Ambulatory Surgical Centers in the state, ensures that abortionists have admitting privileges at a local hospital, and bans painful late abortions on fully formed babies. The admitting privileges portion of the law was the portion responsible for closing abortion clinics and, because so many shut down or stopped doing abortions, abortion advocates claimed that constituted an undue burden on women.

Texas Right to Life emailed LifeNews more about what the high court will do when it reviews the pro-life law.

“In considering HB 2, SCOTUS will consider the vague notion of ‘undue burden’ as originally addressed in the Court’s 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.  For over two decades, this nebulous standard has been used to dismantle Pro-Life legislation, and – although SCOTUS’ deference to the Fifth Circuit’s earlier ruling would have been a victory for HB 2 – the Pro-Life movement at large would welcome clarification of the tenuous “undue burden” standard,” it said.

“In their petition, CRR argued that HB 2 is at odds with the state’s interest to promote health since abortion mills have closed as a result of non-compliance with the increased safety standards set forth in HB 2,” Texas Right to Life added.

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