Abortion empowers no one

In an article by Barbara Kay that we highlighted in our euthanasia round-up post, there was a section I thought was worth highlighting in a separate post.

Kay writes (emphasis mine):

For a glimpse into a future in which euthanasia and assisted suicide are legal, read a short essay by Richard Stith, Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men in the August/September issue of First Things magazine. Stith, who teaches at Valparaiso School of Law in Indiana, makes the persuasive case that when having children became an elective rather than a natural consequence of sex, responsibility for children shifted wholly to women. Men instinctively understood that if conception could be undone, then so could their responsibility for being involved with the children women chose not to terminate.

Instead of empowering women, abortion has placed many women in a cleft stick. As Stith notes: “One investigator, Vincent M. Rue, reported in the Medical Science Monitor, that 64% of American women who abort feel pressed to do so by others. Another, Frederica Mathewes-Green in her book Real Choices, discovered that American women almost always abort to satisfy the desires of people who do not want to care for their children.”

That’s exactly the advice that AskMen.com had to give in the conclusion of their article instructing men how to get a girlfriend to abort (emphasis mine):

If you’ve followed all of these steps and your woman decides to have the baby anyway, this does not mean you’re required to get married or move in together. You’ll probably want to provide for your child regardless, but if you’ve been clear about your intentions from the start, you are not obligated to contribute beyond what your conscience and the law expects of you. This was her decision, not yours, and the bulk of the responsibility is now hers.

Hooray for choice and empowering women! (Alternatively: abortion empowers no one.)