You have heard of Pro-Life and Pro-Choice-What about Pro-Abortion?

 While reading Valerie Tarico's article "Why I am Pro-Abortion, not just Pro-Choice" (Tarico, 2016) I was terribly shaken by the indifference with which Ms. Tarico talks about the human embryo as if it is something that is just merely an inconvenience to be destroyed at a whim.  Her article title is not an accident, it is exactly what she means as she fleshes out her thoughts in a torrent of words based in secular humanism. Ms. Tarico goes through ten reasons that she takes this position and in the next few paragraphs I will endeavor to refute a few of her arguments.  

The first point she makes is that being able to control fertility is key to "female empowerment and equality" and she states "Think of any girl you know who imagines becoming a professional woman. She won't get there unless she has effective, reliable means of managing fertility."  Women do get pregnant outside of the "ideal" timing, but to emphatically state that deciding to have a baby makes a woman less capable of achieving success in a career is absolutely false.  I myself was married young and had my first child at 21.  I managed to raise a family and create a professional career at the same time. I have friends who had babies in their teens and managed to go on and have very successful lives.  This concept is blatantly false.

In a following point, Tarico says that she is pro-abortion because intentional childbearing keeps people and communities out of poverty. She states that "Decades of research in countries ranging from the United States to Bangladesh show that reproductive policy is economic policy" and further that "Early, unsought childbearing nukes economic opportunity and contributes to multigenerational poverty".  This is a broad generalization of what she believes to be the factor on whether a country and its people are successful economically or not.  I am one of seven siblings in my family, so I can agree that bigger families are sometimes less prosperous, but simplifying economics into family planning is short-sighted. And it puts economics above a life created by God, the only Creator of life.

Tarico's next point is "systematic culling makes God or nature the world's biggest abortion provider: nature's way of producing healthy kids essentially requires every woman to have an abortion mill built into her body".  Wow.  So now she is equating God to an abortionist, and she is reducing a very painful process when people miscarry or have stillborn babies to some type of God induced abortion.  There are many issues here, but she has totally forgotten that abortion and miscarriage are two totally different things.  Deliberate abortion which she supports is making a choice to kill innocent life.  Miscarriage or stillbirth is a tragic loss of life that a woman has no choice in. Later in the article, she admits to having an abortion and she defends it as the right decision for her family.  I couldn't help but wonder if this view was her way of making the choice to abort her child okay.

In her final point, Tarico says she is pro-abortion because she loves her daughter.  She talks about an article she wrote called "My abortion baby" where she writes about her daughter whom she loves dearly only being here because she chose to abort a child just a few months before she conceived the daughter she chose to keep. Her argument is that if she had kept the first baby she wouldn't have the one she has now.  She further believes this is a way to refute the claim by those who are pro-life about the millions lost to abortion.  She argues that many of the children that now exist would not exist if abortions had not been performed.  This is circular reasoning.  To say that one child is here as the result of aborting another one is a way of trying to add a good spin to a true evil that is beyond logic. It's saying abortion is ok because it will enable you to somehow have the kids you want to have anyway.

I found this article disturbing on many levels and full of assumptions and generalities that are based solely on opinion with no scientific basis.  As a Christian, I believe God creates life at conception and nobody has the right to take that life back but God.  Killing it is murder, period.

Tarico, Valerie, 2016. Retrieved from https://secularhumanism.org/2016/07/cont-why-i-am-pro-abortion-not-just-pro-choice/