Yesterday, the United States recognized Mother’s Day. I’m used to seeing the posts year after year acknowledging people who have lost mothers, are struggling to conceive, or have otherwise complicated relationships with the holiday. Those make sense to me. But leading up to this Mother’s Day, I saw something different.
“To the women who chose abortion, not out of carelessness but out of love because you knew you couldn’t give your angel what they deserved. This Mother’s Day is for you, too. You mourn. You remember. You made the hardest choice. That’s love. That’s motherhood, in its own way.”
I’ve seen people say that men can be mothers, that abortion is an “act of love,” that there’s such a thing as a pro-choice Christian…but the delusion exhibited in this Tik Tok was disorienting in a way that’s difficult to articulate.
Abortion may not always be careless, but it’s always selfish.
I don’t say that to shame, or to condemn. On some level, we all are.
But selfishness and love can’t coexist. One eventually destroys the other.
And when women choose to end the life that they created, it’s not because they’re thinking about what’s best for the child. It’s not heroism, it’s not altruism, it’s not motherhood.
It’s about a woman seeing her life as she knows it turned upside down. If she were to raise the child she conceived, everything would change. Maybe she’s thinking about her money, maybe she’s thinking about her love life, maybe she’s thinking about her social life. Even if she were to give up the baby for adoption, that would be 9 months of her life she could never get back. How would she explain this to her friends and family? And how long would it take for her body to bounce back?
I get it. Really, I do.
If I found myself unexpectedly expecting, I know I’d face the same panic, the same anxieties, the same despair.
But just because something is normal and human doesn’t mean it’s moral – and it certainly doesn’t mean that it can be turned into something noble.
When we think of mothers and why we set aside a Sunday every May to celebrate them, something unconditional, visceral, and sacred is evoked.
I remember reading something on the Internet where a parent said something along the lines of, “you don’t truly understand love until you become a parent, because you experience a fraction of the love God has for us.”
And I believe it.
Parents – and especially mothers – (ideally) love their children with a purity, intensity and permanence that transcends every other worldly relationship.
That’s why it’s so devastating and unsettling to us when the people meant to protect their children with all they have can abandon them, abuse them, or worse.
When you really love someone, you don’t cut their lives short because they deserve better than you think you can deliver; you become better.
When my mother found out she was pregnant with me she was 23 years old, unwed and in law school, dating a man who told her to abort me. The future she’d been building for years crumbled in moments. I know it would’ve been hard for her to get an abortion. It would’ve been even harder to carry me for nine months only to give me away. But she did the hardest thing she could have done – not a procedure, or a pregnancy, but a lifetime of sacrifice, devotion and perseverance.
I grew up very comfortably. I lived in a nice, spacious house and never really wanted for anything. I was spoiled rotten. I’m ashamed to admit it, but in my darkest hours, sometimes I wished she just listened to her boyfriend. I wish I could have gone to heaven without ever having to be here. It felt like compared to what I was going through, it would have been the easy way out. But love isn’t doing what’s convenient or comfortable, it’s doing what’s right.
As I reread the Tik Tok, I can’t tell if I feel more rage or grief. What she said is absurd, lacks accountability, and attempts to wrap a brutal gesture of self preservation in a bow and a flower crown. I have little patience for it. But I also see someone that is feeling at least a portion of the weight of ending a life, grappling with guilt whether or not she’ll publicly admit it, and desperate to reframe it so she can sleep at night.
I won’t sit silently while she warps reality, but I will acknowledge the depth of her pain and the scars on her heart that may never fully heal.
I think this screenshot reminded me in the worst way that despite major electoral and cultural victories against well-decorated deceit, how deeply we’re entrenched in it, and just how much work we have ahead of us.
I can’t help but wonder if she was told her child was a “clump of cells” or that their execution was “healthcare” prior to making a decision she’s clearly struggling to live with.
I know that her child is the real victim, but I believe she’s a victim too.
She’s a victim of a culture fluent in public relations and platitudes, but starved of principle. A culture that dilutes and distorts the depraved until it can no longer be detected. A culture that “speaks no evil” but embraces it without a second thought.
When a man becomes a woman, when democracy becomes fascism, when illegal aliens become undocumented immigrants, and when murder becomes love, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. For years we were told it was kind and compassionate to soften our language for the sake of the “marginalized” – but a lie told tenderly will always do more damage than a challenging truth. The price of this deception is always steeper than advertised, and our people are paying dearly. With interest.
what do you think?