We value people, all people, at any stage in life
This article is reprinted from the Gospel Coalition website
In 2013, The New York Times Magazine published an article called “What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions?” It traced the story of a woman referred to as “S.” whose baby, at 20 weeks’ gestation, was too far along to be aborted by her local Planned Parenthood. S. reluctantly carried her baby to term, and the journalist chronicled all of the devastating financial and emotional consequences that came with single motherhood. S. lost her job, felt overwhelmed, and thought the baby was mad at her when it cried.
And then, buried in the middle of the dire warnings about the cost to women denied abortion, this paragraph:
S. now says that Baby S. is the best thing that ever happened to her. “She is more than my best friend, more than the love of my life,” S. told me, glowingly. There were white spit-up stains on her green top. “She is just my whole world.”
I thought of S. and her baby last week after watching Virginia Delegate Kathy Tran calmly argue that a single physician should be able to abort a baby even after the onset of labor, if she believes it will injure the mental health of the mother. Many concerned doctors would have written off Baby S. as a danger to her mother’s health. But they would have deprived S. of the best thing that ever happened to her.
Regrettably, full-term abortion for the mental health of the mother is already legal under U.S. federal law, as Joe Carter explains in 4 Facts Every American Should Know About Third-Trimester Abortions. If you feel outrage about what’s happening in states like Virginia, let that outrage fuel fervent prayer to end the murder of infants who happen to be on the wrong side of the birth canal.