Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin’s response this week to mothers who are struggling financially was not better financial and workplace support. Her answer to the high infant and maternal mortality rates among poor and African American families wasn’t better health care.
It was abortion.
On Tuesday in her column at the leftist newspaper, Rubin claimed as “fact” that abortion bans harm families. And the solution to women’s financial and health struggles is to abort their unborn babies.
“Whenever you hear the abortion ban crowd extol their devotion to ‘life’ and to the protection of women …, consider the mound of evidence that documents the physical, emotional, mental and economic toll imposed on women denied an abortion,” she began.
Rubin pointed to two recent studies to back up her claim that protecting unborn babies from abortion causes “suffering.” However, she never entertained the idea that this suffering would be better alleviated by providing maternal and pediatric health care, financial and career support to families. She ignored the heart of the problem, which is not the unborn baby but the circumstances.
“… when the forced birth crowd commandeers from women the decision to give birth, it inflicts economic harm on the women who already are the most vulnerable. Even worse, they set up Black women and infants for greater risk of death,” she accused. “That’s not ‘wokeness’; that’s fact.”
The first study that she pointed to from the National Bureau of Economics examined about 10 years of medical records in California involving births, “infant and maternal hospitalizations and infant death certificate records” and other related records.
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The researchers found that poorer women were more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth, she said. However, they also found that black mothers of all income levels also were more likely to die.
“Money matters. However, race matters more,” Rubin wrote, continuing: “’Across all parental income levels, Black infants and mothers have much worse health than their non-Hispanic white counterparts.’ This is true even for rich, Black women. In fact, if you consider both maternal and infant health, their health outcomes are ‘markedly worse’ than the outcomes for the poorest White women.”
But rather than examine why this problem exists or how to solve it, Rubin’s solution was to kill their unborn babies. Abortion rates in the African American community already are astronomically high, and, in New York City, city health data shows more unborn black babies often are aborted than are born annually.
Abortion activists never consider or seem interested in researching if the high abortion rate may be a factor in the increased risk of maternal and infant deaths among black Americans.
Rubin went on to cite another study, the UCSF “Turnaway Study” – a flawed but widely publicized piece of research by pro-abortion activists. According to the researchers, women who sought but were denied abortions were worse off financially than women who had the abortions that they wanted.
Rubin relied heavily on these findings to make her case. However, she, like most abortion activists, ignored another significant finding from the study that showed 96 percent of women who were denied abortions later were glad they had their babies.
“Money matters,” as she said earlier in the piece, but most women realize money isn’t everything and their children are worth sacrificing for. Unlike Rubin, they realize that their children are not the problem and ending their lives before birth is not the solution to their struggles.
Rubin concluded by urging pro-life lawmakers “who insist they are banning abortion for the sake of women and children [to] consult those affected. They would find out the reality is quite different.”
Perhaps Rubin should take her own advice. Women who chose life for their unborn babies in difficult circumstances overwhelmingly express gladness that they did not fall prey to pressure to have an abortion. And many women who aborted their unborn babies regret their decision and now work in the pro-life movement to educate and support mothers in making better choices. These women realize the circumstances, not their babies’ lives, are the problem, and pro-lifers everywhere are working to help families overcome their struggles and receive the medical, financial and emotional support that they deserve.
