There have been many impassioned pleas on behalf of abortion rights since Texas passed its broad abortion ban (and successfully defended it in the Supreme Court). But one, from famous actress Uma Thurman, inadvertently underscores just how terrible abortion is, and just how important is the fight against it.
Writing in the Washington Post, Thurman states that at the age of 15 she was "accidentally impregnated by a much older man:"
I was living out of a suitcase in Europe, far from my family, and about to start a job. I struggled to figure out what to do. I wanted to keep the baby, but how?
Emphasis added, here and below. For obvious reasons, it is rare for any abortion advocate to acknowledge "the baby" during a defense of abortion rights, but Thurman has admirably done so here. Yet such humanized language is ultimately discarded by the time Thurman discusses her actual abortion:
I was just starting out in my career and didn't have the means to provide a stable home, even for myself. We decided as a family that I couldn't go through with the pregnancy, and agreed that termination was the right choice. My heart was broken nonetheless...
The abortion I had as a teenager was the hardest decision of my life, one that caused me anguish then and that saddens me even now, but it was the path to the life full of joy and love that I have experienced. Choosing not to keep that early pregnancy allowed me to grow up and become the mother I wanted and needed to be.
We might give Uma Thurman proper credit for being so candid about the heartbreak that she experienced undergoing that abortion—abortion is, for so many women, an emotionally devastating experience—while still pointing out that she is, on the whole, acting with a high degree of cowardice here, moving seamlessly from "keeping the baby" to "choosing not to keep the pregnancy."
When discussing the possibility of allowing her child to survive, she refers to it, correctly, as a baby; when contemplating killing it, the baby itself has disappeared, replaced by the "pregnancy." It's a clever trick, and one that avoids confronting the terrible, irrevocable facts of what abortion actually does.
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