RU 486

 

Playing the victim card ignores the real victim: the unborn baby

By Dave Andrusko
As we have documented in exhaustive detail, one wing of the Abortion Movement (and not an insignificant one) has become militantly insistent that women have the “right” to self-abort. And never you mind about state laws, the incredible dangers of buying powerful chemical abortifacients sight unseen, and their own version of “mission creep”: abortions performed well into the second trimester, if not beyond.

Some of the arguments are more sophisticated than the one I’m about to look at, a piece from the student newspaper at the University of Buffalo that ran under the headline (I kid you not), “In prison for parenting.”
National Right to Life News Today readers are familiar with Jennifer Whalen and the publicity campaign to make a martyr out of woman who trolled the Internet for chemical abortifacients to kill her grandchild.
She was recently sentenced to serve a 9-to-18-month in jail (with granted work-release) for what the New York Times’ Emily Bazelon described mockingly as

“[O]rdering pills online that her older daughter took in the first several weeks of an unplanned pregnancy, when she was 16, to induce a miscarriage. The medication was a combination of mifepristone (formerly called RU-486) and misoprostol. The drugs have been available from a doctor with a prescription in the United States since 2000 and are used around the world to induce miscarriage.”

The author of the editorial in the University of Buffalo student newspaper piece obviously read Bazelon’s piece. To their credit, he or she grasped that “The illegality of Whalen’s actions isn’t in question here. There’s no doubt that the dispersal of prescription drugs needs to be strictly monitored and controlled by professionals who are trained to do so.”
So what is in question? “[T]hat Whalen felt she needed to circumvent the law is the real issue at hand.” And that the judge, in the editorial writer’s opinion, was too harsh. That “reveals a lack of sympathy for Whalen’s situation – a situation created by factors entirely outside of her control.” We read

“Tasked with helping her daughter end an unwanted pregnancy – with protecting her daughter and the future she wanted – Whalen didn’t feel like she had any options available, at least not any legal ones (she also says that she didn’t know her actions were illegal when she committed them).”

And since, as the last paragraph concludes, “Thanks to her mother’s efforts, [her daughter] is free to pursue whatever future she desires,” it is “patently unjust that freedom is only a distant hope” for Jennifer Whalen.
Apparently it’s not unjust that the grandbaby has no hope, distant or otherwise.
A couple of thoughts. The list of reasons the editorial cites—distance to the nearest abortion clinic, cost, and ignorance (“if Whalen had known of the risks of ordering pills online”)—is just a backdoor way of getting at the real “enemy”: the absence of an abortion clinic on every corner, any law that requires a waiting period, limitations on how late in pregnancy chemical abortifacients should be used, and (although not mentioned here) requirements that abortion clinics meet minimal standards.
In other words, you (authors of pro-life legislation and, I guess, the FDA) made Ms. Whalen do it. They (taxpayers) should be paying for Ms. Whalen’s teenage daughter’s abortion.
Moreover you and/or they are responsible when the inevitable happens, (but fortunately did not to Ms. Whalen’s daughter): women and girls die.
It’s a very unsubtle argument. We must facilitate abortions, pay for abortions, forget protective laws, and keep parents out of the loop.
Because if we don’t, the blame is not on the women getting the abortion (or the parents who order abortifacients online) but us.

Source: NRLC News