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| Cherilyn Holloway, founder of Pro-Black Pro-Life...condemns 'the shedding of future generations' |
As a senior counsel, she was part of the legal team that argued the Dobbs case before the US Supreme Court leading to its declaration that there is no constitutional right to abortion.
Writing at The Hill news website, Burke clears away some of the myths that have clouded society's understanding of how abortion affects women. She starts this way:
Nearly 50 years of abortion-on-demand has incalculably harmed women and their families. And now we have the opportunity to right the wrongs that Roe wrought.
Truth was one of the first casualties of Roe. To secure and advance their radical agenda, abortion rights proponents repeatedly and brazenly misled Americans. We must advance a comprehensive, life-affirming agenda, while correcting the falsehoods still being peddled by abortion supporters.
Many claim that abortion does not kill a baby, but simply terminates a “clump of cells” or a “potential life.” As the legislative findings supporting Mississippi’s law protecting life after 15 weeks’ gestation recognized, an unborn child’s heart begins beating by six weeks, the child begins to move about in the womb at eight weeks and all of his or her basic physiological functions are present by nine weeks. Anyone who has ever viewed a pregnancy-related ultrasound recognizes its striking images as a living, developing human being.
Abortion rights advocates imply that women are not strong enough or capable enough to manage motherhood and a job, school or other interests. But Americans never fully believed this. In a 2018 Marist poll, 52 percent of respondents acknowledged that in the long run abortion “does more harm than good,” while only 29 percent believed that it improves a woman’s life.
They also argued that American women wanted unrestricted and unregulated access to abortion paid for at taxpayer expense. This bold assertion purposely ignores that many vulnerable women only reluctantly “choose” abortion after the financially incentivized abortion lobby convinces them that abortion is their only choice.
It is worth dwelling on this matter of "choice". A letter to the BMJ (the British Medical Journal) from a British doctor and colleagues makes manifest how it is mostly poverty that pushes women into deciding to abort their child. In other words, if Planned Parenthood and like organisations had mobilised public opinion to institute policies to reduce poverty the practice of abortion would have faded away. The doctor's BMJ letter tackles the catchcry of abortion as a "women's right to chose":
However, the evidence has consistently shown that the vast majority of women request abortions due to a lack of financial resources. A Guttmacher Institute study reported that 73% of women cited this as the motivating factor for abortion. Under these circumstances there is no way abortion can be called a “choice”. Indeed the Guttmacher Institute went on to expressly state in the wake of their study that:
“Qualitative data from in-depth interviews portrayed women who had had an abortion as typically feeling that they had no other choice, given their limited resources and existing responsibilities to others.”
It is in many ways an affront to suggest to women, who are compelled to have an abortion out of poverty and an inability to afford childcare; that they have "chosen” their abortion. It is sadly ironic that in the same issue that the BMJ calls for greater socio-economic diversity in medicine(6), it then only engages in the abortion debate from the vantage point of the privileged.
As the journal recognises, doctors tend to come from affluent backgrounds and thus can fail to empathise and relate to women who literally have to “choose” between abortion and sufficient financial resources to survive or continue the pregnancy with a precarious and uncertain future.
This may be inconceivable for the privileged but the evidence suggests that this is a reality for many, if not the vast majority of women who seek termination of pregnancy. 75% of women requesting abortion in the US are in poverty or in the low income bracket. The poorest 12% of women account for almost 50% of abortions and the poorest 30% for 75% of abortions.
Abortion cannot be a solution for poverty; thereby surreptitiously allowing those in authority to abdicate responsibility of tackling socio-economic inequality.
Burke highlights another myth:
Proponents of abortion tout it as beneficial to women’s health, often hiding evidence that the procedure carries significant physical and psychological risks, and that these medical risks increase as the pregnancy progresses. This lie continues today as these proponents aggressively market dangerous chemical abortions to American women. A 2009 Finnish study revealed that complications were nearly four times more frequent after chemical abortions than surgical abortions.
Rather than abortion, American women need laws that protect them and their families. They need more social and financial support, better access to life-affirming care and the perceived ability to say “yes” to life.
A 2005 study from the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute found that more than 93 percent of abortions were motivated by social and economic concerns. Other studies have placed this number at nearly 97 percent.
The Supreme Court has given state legislatures permission to protect the unborn and promote a culture of life. But this historic decision won’t end the circumstances that drive women to seek abortion. Some women will still fear that abortion is their only option. These women need financial, material and other resources, as well as the unequivocal life-affirming support of American churches and social agencies.
The pro-life community must seize this opportunity to demonstrate that abortion is a false answer to a real difficulty, that choosing life is the answer and that pro-life policies going forward will set the conditions for women and their babies to truly flourish.
Another myth, one that Burke does not mention, is that of abortion being a "right". Courts and governments have made abortion available to their populations, but they have not recognised a "right". Rather, they have granted permission for those who abort to escape penalty. An equivalent to the "right to abort" is the slave-owners' claimed "right" to own certain humans; for the "owners" to decide on the fate of another human.
Burke's argument comes through clearly - the majority of women who seek an abortion don't want to destroy their child. That large majority resort to the ultimate act act of abortion because they carry the burden of poverty, with all the life-complicating factors that poverty brings with it.
All women should unite in ensuring that society makes it possible for all babies to thrive in the womb and out of it, no matter whether the mother is a "party-girl", or is a woman wanting a career, or someone in perilous financial circumstances. This kind of campaign will entail drawing up that "comprehensive, life-affirming agenda" that Burke urges. Such policies would involve fresh support for education, the reining in of corporate power, and the overthrow of bland individualism for the beauty of solidarity.
In a second article from The Hill website we read:
Cherilyn Holloway, founder of Pro-Black Pro-Life, said her heart grieves for the women who feel they are being attacked and their rights stripped away. However, she also said she feels a sense of responsibility to her community now.
“I feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility and opportunity to do more work in these communities to uplift the Black woman in a way that she feels liberated through the community that’s around her and not through the shedding of future generations,” Holloway said.
Holloway said her organization focuses on community and letting women, especially Black women, know that abortion is not their only option.
“The idea that more Black women are going to die because our maternal mortality rate is so high … we’re not saving more Black women by allowing them to have abortions,” said Holloway. “No Black women should be dying in childbirth.”
That’s why she’s focused on combating systemic inequities, like implicit bias in the medical community and economic inequity.
There's a lot of work to be done by way of creating a just society to enable the lives of children of all ages, and their parents, to flourish.
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