A Tribute to the Celebration of the Uniqueness of Every Pregnancy— a Fleeting Thought about Abortion

I would just like to state that my love for men is endless and I'm in no way the worshipper of modern feminist ideologies such as that men are the oppressors. If anyone and anything is oppressing anyone that is the bigotry of the ignorant.

As mentioned in the title I came upon this on my former flatmate's feed on Facebook. She provocatively captioned the post "Thoughts?" just to engage the animalistic almost-pervert curiosity in me. I don't remember the actual title of the video but it was about a speech seemingly taking place at a college campus somewhere in the States, where Ben Shapiro graced the alumni with his presence.

I had no idea who he was. I still don't really know but his persona is not relevant to the topic other than the example he provides by his behaviour.

The one thing of importance is that he is a ferocious advocate of the pro-life choice when it comes to abortions.

The entire video was about him claiming that there's no reason for abortion and that abortion is murder. Some poor woman tried to coerce a response out of him by proposing the idea of wanting to abort a pregnancy that is the product of rape. To which his response was that, I guess 'anti-life' advocates always bring up the extreme cases. He proceeded to describe how it could even be made worse by making the victim of rape also have physical as well as mental disabilities to illustrate the level of disadvantageous tragedies life can compile on a person, but then stating that no matter what your situation is abortion is always murder.

I must be mistaken but I was under the impression that a pro-life advocate is protecting the child. I kind of fail to see how it would be beneficial for the child to be born as the result of rape or to someone who struggles to take care of themselves or someone who has multiple handicaps. Not that people amputees or people with physical or mental disabilities can't be amazing parents— they can be, I'm sure better than some able minded/bodied ones. This is not what the argument was about.

A child that is unwanted but is delivered would suffer the consequences of this choice, repeatedly, along with the mother. It's not a one way road for God's sake.

If they're claiming personhood then they could take the time to consider the effect of the potential environment an infant is brought into and how it will affect its upbringing. Not only the physical environment but the psychological too. A mother that has no love for her child because of its way of conception does no good for the development of the child.

The caretaker's role is crucial in the critical stages of development, there are studies uncovering how simply placing a newborn on the mother straight after birth can have a significant effect on the infant-mother relationship later on in life.

I'm sure people have seen We Need to Talk About Kevin. When I first encountered the story I put the blame on the kid, obviously he was responsible for his behaviour, he took the gun in his hands, he blinded his own sister and killed both his father and her.

With having gathered some life-experience however I realised it was the mother who could not accept him from the beginning. It just confirmed a feeling I had that children involuntarily take on what they understand from the issues their parents have. Since they have very little capacity to digest and deal with responding to what they receive from the parent very early on, coping mechanisms are developed that, if not corrected can lead to several psychopathologies later on in life.

The title character's antisocial behaviour was the byproduct of a mother that instead of confronting her aversion to her first child, to the experience of motherhood and the difference between her expectations and the reality of being a mother, avoided it. It's a perfect example of how rolling a seemingly-minor issue in our life in front of ourselves without addressing it can pile up and become so enormous that when we collapse in exhaustion from our Sisyphean effort to continue the uphill battle, the previously heaped-up load crushes us.

I have first-hand experience in seeing child suffer the "symptoms" of her parents' conflict. The little girl stutters and ticks vehemently to direct her parents attention back to herself, however they're so aggressively lost in their own problems they rather try and treat the little girl via medication instead of solving their own disagreements first. Whether it is blatantly unprofessional to diagnose 6 year-old child with epilepsy is the subject of another rant entirely...

To swerve back to the point; I don't think that pro-life advocates would realise that the environment, in this instance the mother's aversion towards her own child, might be a counterargument to their cause in a narrative such as We Need to Talk About Kevin.

While I know that infertility is debilitating, and I see the backwards logic in encouraging abortion when so many couples suffer from not being able to conceive but adoption is not an option in many cases. In the movie the ideal physical conditions were present, but the mum to live with the nasty term hadno way out of it. She was supposed to love this child, she was supposed to take care of it yet she couldn't. Adoption was not an option because how do you tell your partner that however hard you try you just can't accept your firstborn? You don't.

The other thing I find pro-life people fail to see somehow inherently astounding is that by choosing not to terminate a pregnancy women get attached to the baby. I wonder if Ben Shapiro ever tried to give away a puppy - not a baby, a human being - after living with it for 9 months straight. Women are biologically programmed to be caretakers, and babies, babies are designed so that you cannot do anything else but love them. There's not one parent who thinks their own baby is not delectable and cute. Its features, its scent, the cute short limbs, the chubby fingers and toes; they serve evolutionary purposes to draw the parents in. They're so inviting you can't say no to them. Babies are basically the Twilight version of vampires, perfectly designed adorable chub-bundles with saucer-eyes, sneakily attracting you to cater for their every whim.

After this, they're saying just adopt it.

I love how they say abortion is the easy way out but I don't think Ben Shapiro has a single idea about what it's like to give away a baby once it's born. And then if they don't, despite knowing that the child would have a better chance at a full, prosperous life...What then? I fail to see how the precarious balance of this escapes people. And "have self-control" is just as stupid and useless as telling someone who suffers from anorexia to just eat something.

In addition to claiming it's the easy way out, I really hope Ben Shapiro has had a friend with the same experience mine did and still has the audacity to be pro-life.

Recently I've learnt about a friend's untimely pregnancy. Since she just got a new job and turned 24 a couple of months ago without a potential significant other her resort was abortion. The fetus was the result of a goodbye hook up with an Aussie who flew back the day following the unfortunate event. He was informed, very responsibly offered to come back, and take matters into hand but she refused. I don't think it ever once crossed her mind to keep it. There was no place for a baby in her life and she wasn't going to ruin someone else's prospects as well because of an accident that could happen to anyone. Even the most double-triple protected people can be victimised by those few percentages.

Now I knew about the two procedures one a chemical-hormonal way, the other the surgery. What I didn't know is that after choosing the chemical option they send you home to deal with it alone. My friend was at the time 10 weeks in. At that time the fetus has humanoid features, hands, eyes. I will forever hail her for making it through the whole atrocity alone.

They way she described it was that the baby 'fell out of her' along with the placenta and the umbilical cord. Then she couldn't move for an hour. It had to be the heady cocktail of shock and pain; although she mainly attributed it to the latter.

There was blood everywhere. She had to clean it up, along with the corpse of the fetus all this while still bleeding. Last time I checked she was still strutting around in adult nappies— she is a damn sexy beast in them, nevertheless that doesn't change the fact that there could've been complications. She could've bled to death if there had been any.

Not to mention having to face with this alien thing growing inside you that you just killed. This tiny, blood-cloaked, innocent thing that you have to bury or get rid of somehow.

There are more humane ways of doing this. And I do not think the UK government decided that the NHS, the National Health Service, sent her home with the sole purpose of coercing her to learn by facing the consequences. Neither are they this Machiavellian nor do they have time for elaborate schemes to irritate our psyche. There's a whole different article about the discrepancies this system cannot manage and endanger people's lives.

But to anyone, who says this is the EASY WAY OUT, I wish them to go through the same and not be scarred for life.

I'm sorry to say this but men, by the biological roles nature have bestowed on us, will never be able to conceive a child. Not with the advances of modern society just yet. Therefore anyone who is biologically born a male will not have an understanding of what pregnancy is like.

Therefore I cannot see how someone who will never begin to grasp what it means to carry, nurture, and love a child inside their system can have such goddamn strong opinions about what women should do to their bodies.

A man deciding to have a child in most instances does not have to sacrifice career, education, self-esteem and a young body on the altar to achieve this. A woman's life as she new it ends there. Possibilities are cut, the baby is the centre of the world.

I cannot begin to tell you how many more issues a child born into the arms of a woman who did not want it/was not ready to receive it has in its way. Instead of claiming that the Christian way, the most merciful and beneficial and benign, is that every sperm is sacred why not claim that he Christian way is not enforcing an existence on an innocent creature that does not hold the promise of a better life.

And to the argument that it's always the extremes that are brought up as examples...

A rape victim's child is born autistic, cannot take care of themselves, has other physical or mental impairments because of the stressful, anxious traumatised state of the pregnant woman. Prenatal effects can influence the development of the infant and many factors can contribute to a child born more disadvantageously simply because the mother was not in the right emotional place or state of mind. Would it not then be the Christian way to allow the mother to deal with one trauma at a time.

There are places, such as India, where abortion is difficult to come by. However since some women regard themselves as more than mere baby-factories they might not want to deliver the 10th child that they managed to conceive just because their husband was horny. Or in a worst case scenario conceive every time their husband is horny. Let's not mention the cases where there is no husband in the picture.

Since we're here say one of the child-brides is defiled, at the fresh age of 12, should they keep it too? Should we enforce that too? If it is conceived it has to be born is this the pro-life way? At 12 her life hasn't even started yet. It's not extremes. Just because this is not of precedence in America, Ben Shapiro should not dismiss these cases as extremes. The comfort of the Western world is that he has so much time to philosophise about how other people are treated in his culture that he never stops to think that what he think is a common thing for women in the States is a luxury for the rest of the world. In the midst of all the elevated thoughts he never once realised how thwarted it is to have such sonorous opinion about something he will never once experience in his life, therefore has no capacity to grasp the severeness of.

I have nothing against men speaking their mind. I have nothing against men. Period. I think they have a role in this debate too. However that should ultimately be to support the woman's decision. I don't think I speak out of line when I say pregnancy is the only thing men cannot do. I rather think that if they had learnt what it meant to be a mother, someone capable of conception, they would retrieve their strong opinions.

There's no easy way, the extremes are only extremes in comfortable societies, and abortion is not a one-size-fits-all debate.