Abortion

 

The Emily Letts’ Q & A: “I feel super great about having an abortion”

By Dave Andrusko
Pro-abortionists and pro-lifers alike continue to return to Emily Letts, the abortion clinic “counselor” whose 15 minutes of fame for videotaping her own abortion appears about to be extended, perhaps indefinitely.

We talked yesterday at length about Letts, who won the Abortion Care Network’s “Stigma Busting” video competition. Her video went viral, and Letts has been giving interviews ever since.
Today’s Philadelphia Inquirer included a Q&A between Victor Fiorillo and Letts. It may mean something or nothing, but the first four words are “Philadelphia actress Emily Letts.” That’s like calling me a broadcaster because I talk back to the radio, but….
So Letts tells Fiorillo that filming her abortion and then putting it on YouTube was to get past at that “2000s” stuff and see the women who’ve had abortions. More specifically, we haven’t seen “positive abortion stories.”
Fiorillo dutifully throws Letts a softball question: “And you see your abortion story as a positive one.” (Glad you asked.)
“Yes, I don’t have any guilt. I feel like the reason people are going crazy over my story is because they want it. Women and men have been thirsting for something like this. You don’t have to feel guilty. I feel super great about having an abortion, because it was the right decision for my life.”
Remember, this is the same women who wrote in her post for the Cosmopolitan magazine blog:

“I knew the cameras were in the room during the procedure, but I forgot about them almost immediately. I was focused on staying positive and feeling the love from everyone in the room. I am so lucky that I knew everyone involved, and I was so supported. I remember breathing and humming through it like I was giving birth.”

So, far from feeling guilty, Letts (who giggles as well as hums during the abortion) is positively giddy.
To his credit Fiorillo asks some tough, probing questions. For example, even some women who identify as “pro-choice” have “called the video ‘creepy,’ some said it should have been kept private, some say that you were quite ‘glib.’” As you would expect, Letts completely avoids answering the question.
Fiorillo tries again, this time talking about pro-lifers:

“But you do understand that there’s a huge segment of the population that looks at you as a murderer, that you have destroyed life that God created? You can’t deny that this was at least potential life, and that you ended it.”

Letts responds

“Yes, I do realize it was potential life. I have a special relationship with my ultrasound. People say it sounds weird, it’s my process. I realize it was potential life, and I love it in my own special way. I’m not glib and cavalier. I’m comfortable with my decisions.”

Actually, in a sense, she may be right. Is it glib to say the following (as Letts did on the Cosmo site)–

“I know that sounds weird, but to me, this was as birth-like as it could be. It will always be a special memory for me. I still have my sonogram, and if my apartment were to catch fire, it would be the first thing I’d grab.”

–or symptomatic of something far more serious?
Fiorillo circles back to questions about insensitivity, “especially to all of those people who believe fervently that life begins at conception?” Letts yammers for a bit, argues we aren’t collectively sufficiently empathetic, and then dismissively concludes, “Your religion cannot rule over everyone else.”

He also discretely asks about the fact that some pro-choicers are criticizing her–a woman who describes herself as “a sex educator, and I love talking about birth control”—because she became pregnant after not using birth control.

Letts stalls for time until she has what passes for a flash of insight:“How many times did you do something that you knew had consequences but you did it anyway?,” she tells Fiorillo. “How many times did you not wear your bike helmet?”
There is no way to get to the bottom of Letts’s behavior. Explanations for something this grotesque are few and far between.

We talked about some inklings she provided in her Cosmo blog post. What I didn’t mention was that Letts mentioned about her work .

“Patients at the clinic always ask me if I can relate to them — have I had an abortion? Do I have kids? I was so used to saying, ‘I’ve never had an abortion but…’ While I was pregnant and waiting for my procedure, I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I have to use this.’”

No more of this I-haven’t-walked-in-your-shoes response. Now, thanks to her pregnancy that she was about to abort and YouTube, Letts could not only tell her “clients” that she’d aborted, she could tell the world! Joy and rapture.

One other thought, from her Cosmo post. To Letts, what she was doing was relieving guilt. She wrote

“Our society breeds this guilt. We inhale it from all directions. Even women who come to the clinic completely solid in their decision to have an abortion say they feel guilty for not feeling guilty. Even though they know 110 percent that this is the best decision for them, they pressure themselves to feel bad about.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, isn’t it just as likely—more likely, in fact-that Letts has pressured herself into feeling good about behavior that makes all but the most militant pro-abortionist queasy?

Source: NRLC News