“In spite of ever-increasing restrictions,” write the pro-abortion duo, “abortion is legal through the second-trimester throughout the United States, although it is inaccessible to many women. Yet if women safely end their pregnancies without medical supervision, they face criminal penalties.”
The pair speculates on just why Yaribely Almonte chose a do-it-yourself abortion — via medication or, perhaps, violently beating on her abdomen — in a city where Planned Parenthood’s version of “reproductive health care” is as common as neighborhood groceries once were.
“Is it possible that the relentless headlines about new abortion restrictions across most states have confused some women, who may think that these laws are national?” the two weep. “Or is the (successful) effort by anti-abortion forces to stigmatize abortion effective enough that some women feel too much shame and fear to seek medical care when faced with an unwanted pregnancy? Or did this woman have no trusted health care provider who could direct her to a clinic?”
Whatever the reason, the compassionate pro-aborts opine, this fact is indisputable: “Not every woman wants clinicians involved in her health care, especially if she feels that she can take care of it herself. We each have different ways of dealing with our bodies, our sexuality, and our health care.”
Since it is a woman’s own body, and her own right to deal with the inconvenience of pregnancy as she wishes, “why is self-treating an unwanted pregnancy a crime?” the duo ask rhetorically.
Normal people may genuinely wonder what self-created planet these ghoulish harridans inhabit. What is truly frightening is the realization that their self-centered, murderous worldview is the rule rather than the exception among the pro-abortion crowd.
While emphasizing that “everything possible” should be done to give pregnant women access to the customary methods of infanticide, “if a woman decides that the best thing for her to do is to self-induce an abortion, she should have access to the best information available on how to do this safely,” harmonize Yanow and Herold. “Criminalizing her choices does not protect her health. If we believe that women have the right to control their fertility, then we must also trust women with the right to choose the methods that make the most sense for them.”
Setting aside for a moment the violent immorality of abortion, even “mainstream” abortion advocates draw the line at the do-it-yourself option, so Yanow and Herold are definitely swimming against the tide. For example, the radical National Abortion Federation warns women who don’t know any better that attempting “to end a pregnancy by self-aborting can be very dangerous to your life, health and ability to have children in the future. You may injure yourself or die if you attempt to self-abort.”
Writing on LiveAction.org, pro-life activist Kristen Walker of New Wave Feminists notes that the 2008 film Revolutionary Road “ends with Kate Winslet’s character performing an instillation abortion on herself so that she can be free to move to Paris with her husband and live a more carefree, exciting life than the suburban one currently boring and depressing her. She hemorrhages and dies. I don’t think the film was trying to make a pro-life argument — quite the opposite — but it nevertheless illustrates a universal truth: what we think might liberate us can also destroy us.”
Walker writes that pro-abortion folk “might love the idea of women having the utter, unfettered freedom of D.I.Y. abortions, but to quote the country music songs, freedom isn’t free. It comes at a price, and that price might be a woman’s life.”
However, what individuals like Yanow and Herold once insisted should be both legal and safe they now merely want to be legal — in whatever form. “They routinely defend abortion doctors with pitiful records of harming women, and now they’re telling women they don’t need a doctor at all,” notes Walker.
As for the criminality of murdering one’s baby, in many states self-induced abortion would not be charged as a crime, and in the case of the woman in New York City, dispatching her 24-week-old pre-born earned her a mere misdemeanor. But for Yanow and Herold, even that petty charge apparently represented a miscarriage of justice.
Sadly, for her six-month-old perfectly viable pre-born baby, justice was not even a consideration.
