The Lives of Others

"You wouldn't be here if your mom had an abortion." Except: Maybe you're here because she did.

Photo by Gleren Meneghin on Unsplash

Last week, I went on the podcast Left, Right and Center to talk about the impending demise of Roe v. Wade. I talked about the many women and girls I’ve met over years of reporting on abortion rights: a 12-year-old girl forced to bear her rapist’s baby; a young woman awaiting trial for what she says was a stillbirth; a now-grandmother who was raped by paramilitary soldiers as a girl and starved herself into a miscarriage. Tim Carney, the conservative representing the right on the panel, replied that if we want to talk about fringe cases, we can talk about a woman he knows who was born after her mother was raped by her father. The father an abuser who had impregnated his wife five times; she had ended the previous pregnancies, but kept this one. That child grew up to be a prominent activists against abortion rights. This, Tim seemed to say, was one argument in support of limiting abortion rights: If that woman’s mother had ended her fifth pregnancy, this woman would never have existed, and the world would be worse off for it.

I didn’t say this on the air, but here’s what I was thinking: This woman also wouldn’t have existed if her mother hadn’t had those previous abortions.