Defending multiple abortions is tricky even for militant pro-abortion sites such as rewire.com and for Guttmacher, the abortion industry’s in-house think-tank. But Steph Herold, about whose ramblings we have written multiple times, is up to the task.
Herold’s strategy is to throw every excuse she can come up with for why women have multiple abortions and who feel guilty (but shouldn’t)–external stigma, internal stigma, “structural and institutional barriers to health-care access,” “racism, sexism, classism, and geographic location,” solar flares, lunar tides, etc., etc.–and then comes to the “proper” conclusion. Which is, of course, that the only “bad” thing about annihilating multiple unborn children is if you (a) feel guilty about it and (b) don’t share their demise with others.
After all, why feel shame? She quotes a woman who works at the abortion clinic where she aborted her kids. Herold tells us the woman “realized that she was keeping her personal experiences from her patients for fear of their reaction.”
I started to ask myself why I wouldn’t say that I’ve had multiple abortions aloud. Maybe it can help someone else not feel bad about their choices or not feel judged. There’s nothing to be ashamed about. Multiple abortions are necessary, and a lot of women do it.
A woman who had more than one abortion tells Herold that, after all, since women have sex over “the course of our lives, it only makes sense that people have multiple abortions.”
The personal credo of who-is-to-judge-us crowd crystallized in 14 words.
Herold’s elaborate exercise in excuse-mongering reaches warp speed in her concluding paragraphs where she writes
As the [Guttmacher] study authors note, “the ability to access abortion care when needed—even if more than once—should be prioritized.” While some people may expect negative social consequences for sharing your experiences with abortion, having more than one abortion has no documented negative health outcomes, meaning that there
is no medical reason to encourage women to have fewer abortions. Discouraging patients from seeking the health care they need, including multiple abortions, may in fact contribute to stigma instead of a patient’s physical and mental well-being.
“We’re good people making the best decisions we can for the circumstances we’re in,” Kelsea [a board member of the Carolina Abortion Fund] said. “We should approach people who’ve had multiple abortions with a genuine desire to appreciate where they’re at instead of a judgment about why they did what they did.”
Aside from the children whose lives have been brutally snuffed out–a consideration that is as foreign to Herold as Mandarin Chinese– offing one after another after another has no down side to the woman.(That this is preposterous needs no elaboration here.)
Unless, that is, a “person” (aka a woman) doesn’t talk about her abortions. That faux pas in pro-abortion etiquette lends weight to stigmatization.
And above all else, there can never be, should never be, any “stigma” about using abortion as what the Steph Herolds of this world see as no more than a kind of retroactive birth control.
Daniel Miller is responsible for nearly all of National Right to Life News' political writing.
With the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, Daniel Miller developed a deep obsession with U.S. politics that has never let go of the political scientist. Whether it's the election of Joe Biden, the midterm elections in Congress, the abortion rights debate in the Supreme Court or the mudslinging in the primaries - Daniel Miller is happy to stay up late for you.
Daniel was born and raised in New York. After living in China, working for a news agency and another stint at a major news network, he now lives in Arizona with his two daughters.
