Only the Sick Need a Physician

On Yahoo News I've been seeing a lot of links to Huff Post articles that attempt to glorify the abortion "experience," as though having one were like a trip to Six Flags. There is a website called The Abortion Diary where women can tell their abortion stories or, as their About page brags, "The Abortion Diary is an innovative response to a deep craving for connection and community building amongst people who have had abortion experiences."

See? It's an experience.

I couldn't find any articles, just podcasts, most of them 15 or more minutes in length. I don't have the patience. Besides, what are they going to tell me? That they had their babies killed? That a doctor went inside their bodies and cut the kid to pieces, or hormoned it into premature delivery, or burned its skin off with a hyper-salty solution?

Why do women want to tell these stories? One such is Amanda Englund.

I feel like I didn’t realize how much I needed to tell this story until it was happening," she said. "And how I felt afterwards really showed me a part of myself that had stopped kind of living after the abortion experience."

See? It's an experience. Now I realize that her syntax is hard to follow. The first sentence doesn't even make sense. But I am curious about that "part of myself that had stopped kind of living." Kind of? You're either dead or you're alive. But she didn't mean she had stopped living in the same way that her ex-baby had stopped living. She meant something else. I just don't know what.

Says the Huff article:

For Englund, finally opening up about her experience made a small, but influential, change in her day-to-day life. "It just reopened a part of my life that I had closed so firmly," she said.

Uh-huh. And what part would that be?

I feel like whenever you close something like that, other things are affected, other parts of yourself are affected. … It’s more of a subtle inward change that I experienced."

She sure "feels like" a lot. But what is she talking about? The Huff propagandist tells us:

While few of her peers noticed the difference, Englund said that after processing her decision, she has fully embraced her sexuality in a new way.

I had a "feeling" that's where we were headed.

It’s been nine years, so I’ve had a long time to really heal from it.

From what? And why did you need to heal from it?

But it’s just sort of my own self and how I relate to my body and how I feel about myself as a sexual person.

What is just sort of your own self? For God's sake. Maybe she means that what needed healing was her reluctance to have sex out of fear of pregnancy, not out of guilt at having her baby killed. I'm just guessing. I refuse to listen to the podcast.

I’m having a lot better sex these days, and I know that it’s from telling that story and starting that path of healing."

All's well with the world then.

There's another Huff article adulating one Leyla Josephine. It features a video in which Leyla recites her poem "I Think She was a She." Leyla is billed as a "word poet" and "performance artist," but her Glasgow brogue is so heavy I couldn't tell whether she was a brilliant poet or dumb as a teapot. She repeats several times, "I am not ashamed." To the "she" who is not here to appreciate the word poetry, Leyla pays a singular tribute:

I would’ve supported her right to choose. To choose a life for herself, a path for herself. I would’ve died for that right like she died for mine. I’m sorry, but you came at the wrong time.

Even if she's smart, she's stupid. The whole race is stupid. All sin is selfishness, some degrees of it more depraved than others, and of the sort that afflicts these women, I don't think reason can repair it. I don't like defaulting to despair, but we can't be fixed. We're too screwed up. It's a kind of pscychopathy. We live in an age when people write poetry that celebrates the 'right' to kill a baby because he showed up "at the wrong time." Sort of like Jesus, who apparently couldn't wait until his parents were married. Joseph was not pleased. Things worked out in the end because he had angels to talk to. We don't.

Pro-lifers like to talk about the 'right to life.' I'm sure Leyla believes in that right. She exercised it when she killed her baby. That people can think that a right to life is a license to kill illustrates my reason for losing faith in reason.