Tango Bango

Pro-life is easy if you’re privileged

Do you know that many women who are doing their pre-abortion counseling at Planned Parenthood say things like:

- “I’m not like all the other girls/women in the waiting room.”
- “I don’t believe in abortion, I think it is morally wrong.”
- “I just can’t do this right now, it will ruin my life. But I feel so guilty because I’ve been pro-life this whole time.” 

The moral of the story is that it’s easier to be “pro life” when you’re not in the situation yourself.  A good percentage of the women in abortion clinics find themselves in situations where they cannot afford a child, where they feel they are already undersupporting the children they have, where their birth control failed, where they risk being beaten by their parents or significant others, and struggle with the fact that they considered themselves ‘pro-life’ before coming into these circumstances.

Let’s see how you feel about abortion when a 30 year old woman comes in, battered and bruised from her drug addicted husband, screaming that she can’t have the child because she is trying to run away from her partner and needs to live on the street while she finds herself a new life without him.  See how you feel while she is bawling because she doesn’t want to lose her baby, but feels that her life is at risk if she carries this man’s baby to term.  Imagine how you would feel without a support system, without help.

How would you feel if you were homeless, addicted to crack and meth, struggling just to live, selling your body so that you can buy food for yourself, living in a dirty alley?  How about if you were then pregnant because you were raped while sleeping out in the open? Unable to care for yourself properly, yet supposed to nurture your body and help yourself deliver a healthy child? Unable to access resources to help you get clean and forced to have a baby who is born addicted to crack that no one will want to adopt?

In your perfect privileged world, it’s easy to be against abortion.  It’s easy to be blind to the true struggles that underprivileged women go through.  It’s easy to assume that what you want for yourself and your family is what everyone should legally be forced to want as well.