An Israeli celebrity came under fire last week from pro- and anti-abortion forces alike when she suggested that abortion could have prevented the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
On Thursday, Rebecca “Becky” Griffin, a model, television host, and actress of Irish-American and Jewish parentage, tweeted: “Woman puts baby up for adoption, he grows up to be a violent young man who will spend the rest of his life in prison for a mass murder. Tell me more about how abortions are wrong.”
Griffin was referring to 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, the suspect in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 people dead and another 13 injured. Cruz was adopted at birth. His adoptive mother died in November; his adoptive father had passed away several years earlier.
Griffin’s tweet implied that Cruz’s birth mother should have exterminated him in the womb rather than put him up for adoption, a point that she made explicitly in a follow-up tweet responding to critics: “Lol. This drew so much attention by ppl jumping to conclusions like I think adoption is wrong, when all I said was that a woman who was clearly unfit to have a child — did — did NOT raise him — and maybe it could have turned out better if she could have made a CHOICE.”
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, there was nothing in U.S. or Florida law preventing Cruz’s birth mother from aborting him. She made her choice. She could not have known what atrocities her son would one day allegedly commit, and even if she had had an inkling of them, that would not have justified preemptively killing him in utero.
Besides, as many of those replying to Griffin’s tweets pointed out, most adopted children have grown up to become productive members of society, and some have even been outstanding leaders and innovators.
“Woman puts baby up for adoption, he turns out to be Steve Jobs,” conservative commentator Ben Shapiro tweeted in a parody of Griffin’s remark. “Tell me again how abortions are right.”
Even supporters of legal abortion were aghast at Griffin’s tweets. Freelance reporter Robin Marty, for instance, responded, “Wow. Dear abortion rights supporters — if you are using the fact that the Florida shooter was adopted to promote keeping abortion legal, you are doing it very, VERY wrong.”
Griffin tried to justify her stance on two bases. First she argued that widespread abortion has led to lower crime rates by weeding out those likely to commit crimes, a theory that has been debunked by multiple researchers. Then she maintained that because mental illness is a heritable condition, anyone with mental illness should be prohibited from procreating.
“Mental illness is genetic,” she tweeted. “So if the shooter was mentally ill — guess where it came from? The parents who were unfit to raise him.”
Cruz’s birth mother, Griffin wrote, “should have never been allowed to have kids. Ever. I’m sorry if this hurts the mentally ill people here, but maybe stop being selfish and narcissistic and recognize you have emotional deficits that can harm your own kids and family.”
One respondent parried Griffin thus: “Yes, mental illness can be genetic. But it can be treated. It’s not guaranteed. Genetic or not, outside forces — parents, social environment, etc. — often play a big role. People aren’t predestined to be monsters. Thus, this justification for abortion crumbles.”
Griffin, however, wasn’t finished. Noting that some respondents had suggested she should have been aborted, Griffin actually agreed with them, saying her mother is “mentally ill, was unfit to be a mother, and caused nothing but pain to her family. She should never have had children but society conditioned her to be [a mother].”
Deciding who may or may not have children — to keep the “unfit” from procreating — was, of course, the rationale behind the eugenics movement. That movement led to both the Nazi Holocaust and legalized abortion, which in the United States alone has killed over 60 million people, dwarfing even the highest estimates of the Holocaust’s death toll.
Using a school shooting to argue for gun control is bad enough; using it to stump for actual murder is reprehensible. Griffin, unfortunately, appears unrepentant.
