Anxious to drown out the voices of pro-lifers in the days just before the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a major abortion case, abortion activists have been publicizing stories claiming that many women are glad they aborted their unborn babies.
The latest pro-abortion effort came from TV actress Amy Brenneman who told the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan that she has never regretted her abortion.
Brenneman mentioned the U.S. Supreme Court case Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt as the reason she was writing for the magazine. Scheduled to be heard by the high court on Wednesday, the case was bought by abortion businesses against a pro-life Texas law responsible for closing abortion clinics that could not guarantee they could protect the health of Texas women. The law has been credited with saving the lives of more than 10,000 unborn children.
Brenneman said she felt prompted to tell her story after asking Nancy Keenan, the former president of the radical pro-abortion group NARAL, why the pro-abortion movement is losing support while the pro-life movement is gaining it.
“She answered with one simple word: ‘stories,’” Brenneman said. “This makes sense to me. I am a storyteller by trade, after all. I believe that we connect and learn by the specifics of stories, our own and others’.”
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Brenneman told her abortion story to Cosmo:
So here is my story.
In the spring of my junior year at Harvard, my period was late. I had been in a relationship for almost two years with a loving and supportive boyfriend. We used birth control, but it malfunctioned. When I learned I was pregnant, I knew immediately and without question that I wanted an abortion. I had no desire to be a mother at that time — I wanted to finish college and start my career.
We found a doctor in the yellow pages. We went to his clean and respectable office. I had the procedure done with no pain; my boyfriend was with me the whole time. Afterward, I breathed huge sigh of relief and thought to myself, I get my life back! I was grateful that I lived in a country where forced birth was not the law of the land and where motherhood was not a lifelong consequence for a contraception slip.
I have never, not for one moment, regretted my abortion. My husband of 20 years and I became parents when we had built a home to nurture our children. Indeed, being a parent has only strengthened my commitment to reproductive justice as access to legal abortion allows children a fighting chance to be born into families that desire them and can support them.
Brenneman and Keenan are right about people’s stories. Individuals’ personal experiences are a powerful part of any debate.
However, when it comes to abortion, Brenneman fails to understand that it’s not just women’s stories that are powerful. True, the stories of women who suffer pain and regret from their abortions and of women who choose life are changing people’s minds about abortion. But just as powerful are the stories of these women’s unborn babies, some who lived, some who died.
And perhaps the stories that make the most impact are the ones that aren’t told at all. Our knowledge of all the stories that could have been but were lost. The would-be stories of 58 million unborn babies who never had the chance to have one because they were aborted.
