In a recent article, Jenna Ellis remains anti-abortion, but in her so-called compassion for women who have abortions, she comes too close to justifying their decision.
Her article reads more like a piece that could have been written by Hillary Clinton defending the need for abortion rather than promoting anti-abortion goals. She lists all the good practical reasons and the pressures put on women by their men to have abortions.
Reading her pro-life article, it seems that pro-life proponents must find themselves supporting vast therapy networks. It seems she is calling for policies that invest vast sums of money so that both men and women do not feel so threatened by accepting the baby’s birth. However, she ignores God’s role. Those difficult circumstances are nothing compared to the distortions and ultimately miserable God-generated circumstances if they sorrowfully accept the need to kill that baby, that human, that soul-bearing individual.
This is high school pro-abortion drivel claiming to be anti-abortion. There is no reference to Almighty God. There is no mention of the guilt that follows abortion. There is no mention of the social consequences of abortion — losing millions of people contributing to Social Security or persons available to serve in the military or to pay taxes that support our government. There is no mention of the joys of child rearing. The supposedly pro-life article relates all the fears of the women and the men who procreated these children and seems to want the readers to be more sympathetic with the irresponsible choices of those individuals who desire to have more “control” over their lives.
The irony here is that the women have in many cases become pregnant because of LACK OF SELF CONTROL. They want more self-control over their lives so they can have less self-control.
However, lack of self-control alone would suggest that unwanted pregnancies are primarily psychological issues. Actually, they are primarily spiritual issues and represent a rejection of the moral order established by God. They are products of the sexual revolution — the endless irresponsible search for pleasure and ecstatic distractions from life’s responsibilities, pressures, expenses, confusions, fears, doubts, and many sinful temptations that beset us all every day. The negatives in Ms. Ellis’ article that she claims lead women to not want to keep the baby, and lead many of the men in their lives to insist on abortions, are the same pressures and negatives that caused them to conceive in the first place.
The negatives — the financial pressures, the sense of not being loved enough, the sense of being overwhelmed by the children you have already birthed, the sense of being alone to fight life’s battles, and the sense of already being overburdened – will not be dispelled by abortion. Those excuses for having the abortion are deceptions. It’s part of the same deception that having some sexy good times will offset the unwanted pressures of everyday life. If the woman can continue as a “party girl,” and remain in flight from responsibility to that “fetus” and to society, she still will not find happiness and satisfaction after the abortion. The dark place of “fear and trembling” that the great philosopher Soren Kirkegaard wrote about will continue to follow those women around no matter how much pleasure they seek and find, no matter how many “boyfriends” they satisfy, no matter, no matter.
A man I know who worked as a maintenance worker in the projects of a major city had many offers for intimacy by women living in the projects. They did not ask him if he had “protection” (a rubber) nor did they say they were on the pill. In one typical case, he came in to fix a sink faucet, and the woman tenant said, “Let’s go up on the roof. There’s a good spot for us up there.” This was not just one exceptional moment in time, and he was not the only one approached this way. Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, believed that Victorian morality should be liberated by the expression of the pleasure principle that lay mostly buried in the unconscious. Although he won the battle to promote the pleasure principle, he was wrong.
In Ellis’ article she offers the following statistic “48% [of women in abortion clinics] said they didn’t want to be a single mother or were having relationship problems.” That means 52% did not say that. She said, “73% of women said that they couldn’t afford a baby at that time.” Well, 72% of African-American babies are now born out of wedlock, and the reason largely assumed is that the women do better economically with the government shelling out more and more dollars via welfare than if they were married, depended on one man, and had fewer babies. Yet, at the same time, they also have a high level of abortions – 40% of aborted babies in the USA. In short, it’s not mainly about money, but is from a lack of moral focus via the Word of God.
Respect for the institution of marriage and family is the answer, not a financial decision about whether to abort or not to abort.
Ellis writes in her article “We also need to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions…. Are we present not just at the clinic doors but for the years that follow?… Are we surrounding women with communities that say, you don’t have to do this alone?” She almost is asking for society to semi-adopt women who are going for abortions. She seems to believe that women will not abort as much if government (in some unspecified way) becomes big daddy or big mommy to both those mommies and their babies. Society then will somehow go beyond mere welfare payments to help women if they choose to keep the baby.
Most abortions – about 2/3 –are had by women in their 20’s. Is society to assume responsibility for the extended adolescence of too many women in our society? Is incessantly having sexual intercourse and then killing the unborn through one’s twenties a lifestyle that we must somehow take responsibility for? If society will take more responsibility for the mother and baby if the baby is allowed to live, then will the killing part of the equation be diminished? Should society become more parental towards its millions of wayward “daughters?”
No, and no. We need to stay focused on the moral reality that abortion is a grievous moral violation of the Sixth Commandment.
Jeffrey Ludwig
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