It is amazing how, in the effort to preserve abortion on demand, all reality must now be refracted through a pro-abortion lens.

One enormous bit of disinformation being broadly circulated by the legacy media and political partisans of abortion is that pregnancy without the backup guarantee of abortion on demand through birth is inherently dangerous, risky, and almost irresponsible behavior. In that prevailing narrative, no 21st-century woman would dare risk pregnancy absent the guarantee to be able to end that pregnancy at any time prior to birth.

Like the “thousands” of back-alley abortions fabricated to make the case for abortion legalization, the new argument is that pro-life states have so intimidated medical professionals that even normal care for miscarriage will be denied because it might be taken as providing an illegal abortion. In the post-COVID-19 sensitivity to disease (ever noticed the disproportionate number of women of prime childbearing age still sporting masks?), modern pregnancy is now deemed a minefield of complications, while abortion is a simple procedure affording a universal remedy to all pregnancy-related complications.

And not just health complications. The Hastings Center Report carries an article, “The Insult of Involuntary Adoption and the Moral Seriousness of Motherhood,” in which author Katie Watson contends that adoption is never a truly free choice unless accompanied by abortion on demand.  How so?  Because becoming pregnant makes one a mother, while surrendering a child for adoption after birth because abortion was not an option is forced “parenthood” without actual parenting.

Watson dismisses the claim that a pregnant woman unwilling to raise or incapable of raising a child who has no resort to abortion has an alternative in surrendering the child for adoption. That “alternative” is no alternative unless the option not to surrender but to abort the child is there. Absent the abortion “alternative,” adoption becomes a coerced choice based on the woman’s situated freedom — the constellation of factors and circumstances in her life rendering her actual parenting difficult or impossible — a forced choice incompatible with a person’s autonomy and dignity in a pluralistic society.

Pro-life persons would argue that Watson wants it both ways: abortionists insist conception is not — legally, morally, or medically — a determinative moment, yet they want to make it the start of “motherhood.” Watson sees no contradiction.  Even if what has begun is only a potential life that makes the woman a “potential mother,” it requires her to make decisions shaping “the future” and its outcomes.  Because she is making those future choices, it is precisely there that the locus of choice including abortion must be found. Because this potential life will become a life at (or maybe a little after) birth, to prohibit abortion but offer the “alternative” of adoption is to force one into parenthood one cannot then actually exercise.  That Watson regards as unjust and unethical.

This convoluted “logic” may not be as rare as one might at first glance imagine.  I can cite two examples where it already reared its head.

Cardinal Seán O’Malley touched upon a similar theme during his keynote address to the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life at Georgetown in 2024.  Speaking about efforts to promote adoption as an alternative to abortion, he noted that one reason some women opt for the latter is the feeling that handing a child off to other persons, perhaps unknown ones, for an unknown future is a greater risk and indeterminacy than the finality of abortion. In other words, it is better to know one’s child is dead than not knowing what might have befallen that child once one surrendered maternal rights because motherhood really cannot be given up.  Somehow, the “maternal instinct” for the welfare of one’s child seems to be more satisfied by a certain fate than an uncertain one.

The same question was also broached in one of the Supreme Court oral arguments prior to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (though I’ll admit I am having difficulties relocating which case).  The question again surrounded adoption and veered into one of those philosophical debates about whether, if non-continuance of pregnancy could be separated from fetal death, the “abortion right” would fall.  (Imagine, for example, if neonatal technology ever made it possible to deliver and sustain a now nonviable fetus artificially.)

Essentially, the argument came down to: What does the “right to abortion” include?  Does it encompass the “right to end a pregnancy” or “the right to a dead fetus”?  The abortionists’ position was the latter, for the same reasons Watson advances: The right to end a pregnancy without extinguishing the results of that “potential” motherhood means a living child forces parenthood on to a woman against her will, a status she should be constitutionally entitled to refuse.

It’s clear that what’s at stake here is not merely the right to access abortion as a way of removing an immediate “problem.”  The philosophy and theology behind the pro-abortion movement are nothing less than a godlike erasure of history, as if what happened did not happen. Abortion should not just eliminate the immediate problem; by feigning agnosticism about when life begins, it must allow us to equivocate about what has in fact happened in order to try to expunge its natural consequences.

In Roe v. Wade, Justice Harry Blackmun opined that a “woman cannot be isolated in her privacy.” He was more prescient than he realized: Abortion on demand claims not just to get rid of her immediate problem, but it insists on erasing any trace of the relationships that the conception created.  Paradoxically, it drives the woman even further into an isolated, non-relational individualism.