Fundación is a village of secrets. Rural towns like this one were ground zero for the terror tactics of Colombia’s civil war, blocked from the outside first by the guerrilla fighters and then by the paramilitaries; some, like Fundación, were also places people fled to when home was even worse. This town is full of women whose bodies tell the story of conflict fought, mainly, by men. Some of their scars are obvious, still seared into skin. Others are psychic, invisible and below the surface.
Sofia’s are physical, a bullet hole over her left breast and a jagged line down her left arm from where surgeons had to cut open to repair the shattered bone. “There’s a saying here,” she says. “Small town, big hell.” Sofia (a pseudonym) is 42 and beautiful, slender with high cheekbones and almond eyes, square white teeth, and a kebab stick through a low bun of thick hair. A curly-haired toddler, her granddaughter, pads across a room that doubles as Sofia’s studio: she’s a self-taught seamstress, although it’s hard to sew with a hand that doesn’t fully close anymore.
Back in 2003, she was a teenage-mother-turned-sex-worker who had left small Fundación for a town on the Magdalena river in the state of Santander. She was kidnapped by a local paramilitary group and forced her to have sex with the leader, a man called Tiburón – “shark”. He was the one who shot her after she tried to run away on her third day of captivity. The man who had her kidnapped was a doctor, and he splinted her shattered arm. On the fifth day, he let her go.
She told no one about the rape, not even doctors at the hospital when she finally sought care weeks later. It was a motorcycle accident, she said; the clinic owner was friends with her brother, so he looked the other way.
Years later, a woman named Estella came knocking on Sofia’s door. Estella was helping sexual assault survivors connect with each other and seek recompence from the government; her program also offered contraception and sex education in a town where one residual effect of the trauma of war is astoundingly high rates of teen pregnancy and sexual violence. Sofia’s story began, slowly, to trickle out.
And then, in a country thousands of miles to the north, Donald Trump was elected president.
No single nation has as much influence on abortion rights and access for the world’s women as the USA, and no single nation has worked as diligently to prevent women outside its borders from being able to end their pregnancies. Anti-abortion activists have agitated against liberalisation in countries across Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. The Trump administration made common cause with the authoritarian governments of Poland, Saudi Arabia, and others in restricting even open conversation about women’s reproductive needs on the international stage. And the long arm of US anti-abortion policy — which comes along with the alternate handing-out or grabbing-back of US money — continues to determine whether or not women who are not American citizens and may have never set foot on US territory can prevent pregnancy, decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy, or even find assistance if they’ve been raped.
That long arm has reached from hectic cities to far-flung villages to tiny towns, such as Fundación.
Trump effectively shuttered the Fundación program, along with hundreds of others across the globe, all combating sexual violence and funding family planning. Some may get back on their feet; many won’t. And even though he has left the White House, his legacy of anti-abortion alliances with some of the world’s worst human rights offenders remains.
The United States has been on a zig-zag path of extreme restrictions met, impotently, by occasional recalibration to a conservative status quo. Texas is only the most recent state to have functionally banned most abortions. The US Supreme Court has accepted a case that challenges Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalised abortion across the United States; the Court could flat-out overturn Roe, making abortion immediately illegal in several states, or it could keep the decision technically in place but gut it into an empty legal shell.
And even though a Democratic president has been in office since January, USAID money to the Fundación program has not been restored. And after the election in 2024, a shift in power would almost surely mean being defunded yet again.
This has left international healthcare workers spinning, and trying to keep up with the Americans and their whiplash-inducing policy changes.
Fundación is less than an hour’s drive from Aracataca, the childhood home of Colombia’s beloved native son Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the purported inspiration for the village at the center of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Estella, 54, guides our driver over the town’s bumpy roads as she makes calls on her pre-smartphone cell, tapping out the phone numbers with her carefully manicured nails. We arrive at the door of 65-year-old twins Doris and Francia, who live in a ramshackle house cluttered with old objects and well-loved collections, both women have the same dyed caramel-colored hair, both raspy-voiced and tired-eyed. Doris wears glasses and a pink-striped spaghetti-strap tank top; Francia totes a bald, big-eyed baby, one of her 21 grandchildren.
Both women have lived the story of Colombia’s brutal civil war, and both women know that their lives were forever changed by the whims of more-powerful men who decided, for reasons that remain mysterious to them, to target their town – and then to target Doris and Francia and many other women in it. That story lives in their flesh, and even two decades later, they carry its heavy memory.
In 2001, Colombia’s civil war was raging, and paramilitaries had captured Doris and Francia’s town and forced their business to shutter. Doris and Francia turned to picking bananas for money, hitching rides on the backs of cattle trucks to get home. One evening, both women were plucked from the side of the road and gang-raped by soldiers. They could never go back to picking bananas – they could barely leave the house. They saw friends, neighbours, and family members threatened and even murdered. They stayed silent.
That is, until they met Estella. Like nearly all of the women she works with, Estella is from somewhere else. She came here in 2002 when her family was displaced by the fighting, joining the many displaced families around Fundación who live in fear and poverty, and may never go back home. Estella encouraged the women she met to talk about their experiences, eventually forming an ad-hoc therapy group.
In 2016, Profamilia came to town. Colombia’s version of Planned Parenthood, it is the country’s largest provider of reproductive health services. In partnership with USAID, it conceived an ambitious outreach program to combat the high rates of unintended pregnancy and violence in Colombia’s rural reaches. Places with limited access to reproductive health care were targeted, as well as those with high rates of internally displaced people, extreme poverty, young people who were dropping out of school because of displacement, and adolescent pregnancy. One of these was Fundación.
“Some of these areas are where the biggest concentration of drug lands are,” says Marta Royo, the executive director of Profamilia. “So [USAID and Profamilia] were really focused on developing programs that could empower adolescents and give them an idea that there were other possibilities for a different future.”
They started with contraception, but quickly realised this didn’t capture the full scope of hardships rural Colombian women face. The high rate of teenage pregnancy in Fundación and many of the country’s other rural areas cannot be separated from the 50-year conflict that has made Colombia the nation with the highest number of internally displaced people on the planet, and second only to Syria in the number of forcibly displaced people generally (while most Syrians have left their country, 98% of displaced Colombians remain within their nation’s borders).
Violence against women was pervasive in the Colombian conflict, a tidal wave of trauma that rippled out for generations. In these same towns where families were ripped apart, women were raped, and people were forced to flee. There is now a generation of devastated people, uprooted, vulnerable, and trying to raise children and grandchildren in the shadow of a lingering catastrophe.
Profamilia met Estella and women like her to ensure they, their children, and grandchildren had access to contraception and sex education. But less than a year into the program, Trump’s election victory upset everything. In his first week in office, the new President used his powers to issue the Promoting Life in Global Health Assistance Act (PLGHA), an executive order opponents call the Global Gag Rule that cut off funding to any organisation that provided abortions with its own non-US funds, advocated for abortion rights, or referred women for safe, legal abortions. This was just the latest and most expansive iteration of a policy put into place by American president Ronald Reagan in 1985, and alternately rescinded by Democratic presidents and restored by Republican ones.
Profamilia’s funding was cut because the organisation provides safe abortions in accordance with Colombian law. The USAID-funded program was stopped a year early, having only spent half of its $2 million grant.
Colombia wasn’t the only nation hit hard. The PLGHA applied not just US family planning spending, but all US dollars spent abroad, including money spent on HIV/AIDS, malaria, and nutrition — some $12 billion in 2018. It applied even to organisations that didn’t receive US funds — if they accepted money from groups that did, they had to agree to be bound by the PLGHA limitations.
When organisations sued over previous versions of the rule and argued that it violated First Amendment free speech protections, their cases were dismissed because of lack of standing. The First Amendment doesn’t apply to foreign organisations or foreign nationals working overseas, and there’s no law saying the US government cannot attempt to restrict free speech abroad.
The Trump administration’s position on women’s rights and health extended far beyond abortion, and was more conservative than previous Republican administrations. In 2019, the US issued its annual human rights report, and had made some notable edits. Much of the information on reproductive health that had been standard in earlier versions was stripped out, including statistics about contraception access and maternal mortality. Had those figures been included, they would have indicated that there remains a significant unmet need for contraception, and that unsafe abortion is a leading cause of maternal death.
It is this erasing of the politically inconvenient and the enforced silence that most rankles. In Colombia, abortion is legal under several circumstances, including for rape survivors. How, Royo asks, could the US come in and say, “let’s talk about democracy, let’s talk about freedom of speech, let’s talk about respect of the law,” and then implement a rule that doesn’t allow health organisations to work according to the laws of their own country? “The message that as a country they’re sending is the opposite of believing in women’s equal rights.”
Other Western governments agreed. In response to the Trump cuts, and perhaps seeking to distinguish themselves from the Americans as exemplars of feminism and human rights, Canada, Europe and the UK rallied behind women’s health. The Netherlands set up the #SheDecides fund so donors could fill the $600 million shortfall created by US cuts, and began by donating 10 million euros. Norway announced it would give $10 million. Canada gave $20 million. Along with the Gates Foundation and UNFPA, the UK co-hosted an international family planning summit which raised $2.5 billion, including a five-year annual commitment of £45 million from the British government for services abroad.
Trump’s reactionary views on reproductive health pushed more progressive nations not just into the funding space, but into the discourse. To have countries like Sweden and Canada in the mix, Royo says, brought an explicitly feminist frame to the discussion, allowed solutions to be more expansive and creative, and gave health care providers more freedom to address the real problems in their country without tiptoeing around American abortion politics.
Shortly after he took office, Joe Biden undid Trump’s Gag Rule, restoring the US to a still-uneasy compromise of refusing to pay for legal abortion services, but at least funding pro-choice organisations for other services. The sweep of a pen, however, can’t build back dismantled infrastructure or immediately reestablish hard-earned trust. Pre-existing USAID contracts don’t just snap back; any NGO that was getting money now has to start from square one, identifying areas of need, drawing up plans, and jumping through American bureaucratic hoops for money that could very well be pulled four years from now.
Also, while his policies were devastating to reproductive healthcare access worldwide, Trumpism gave other nations something to publicly stand up against. Now that he’s out, and with Covid-19 wreaking havoc on economies, some countries are backing away from their Trump-era commitments. The UK is the most prominent: it announced a reduction in its foreign aid commitments from 0.7 percent of its gross national income to 0.5 percent, which creates a gap of more than £4 billion. Although the government has not yet said exactly where all the cuts will be made, women’s health organisations say they seem to be first on the chopping block: UNFPA, the UN’s primary family planning arm, said their UK funding had been slashed by 85%. Just a year ago, the FCDO promised UNFPA a whopping £425 million through 2025. Now, they’re reneging on that commitment.
In Colombia, money comes and goes as the rules change, but the need doesn’t dwindle – especially for the country’s many rape survivors.
“Here in Colombia, rape is like, how can I put it – it’s part of the essence, it’s taken totally for granted,” Royo says. “Women and girls are raped and no one says anything. Part of the counseling we provide, it starts with recognising, no, that is not normal.” This is part of Royo’s frustration with the US funding fluctuations: much-needed money is conditioned on reinforcing broad stigma and silence on the sensitive topic of abortion. That feels uncomfortably akin to how women who are raped here are coerced and sometimes forced into shame and silence.
You hear this in the stories Estella’s women tell. Most are like Sofia’s and Doris’s and Francia’s: there is a rape, there follows years of secrecy, maybe there is an attempt to report, to make real what was for so long hidden, and then there is nothing – layers of secrecy and silence, a covering of ears even when women try to speak. In 2013, Estella told Sofia that the Colombian government was documenting the many war crimes and offering compensation to victims. Sofia was scared – “It was the paramilitaries. They had a lot of power. They still do” – but filed the report anyway.
That was years ago, and compensation still hasn’t materialised. “I haven’t even gotten a potato,” she says.
Still, Estella was proud of her. And after being so quiet for so long, it felt good to speak.
Why is it America’s responsibility to pay for abortions in other countries? I would understand if America was actively interfering, but all America is choosing to do is to determine what their grants can go to. If other countries want to help out or NGOs want to have their own health programs, I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the idea that America has some special obligation to spend its money the exact way the author wants or that abortion is a special “human right” that is owed to them.
It’s not America’s responsibility, you’re right. I happen to be an American being taxed for these grants and would rather I didn’t contribute to abortion anywhere. The author has a strange point in the middle of the article where she states that other countries stepped up to provide for stable funding of abortions (somehow related to free speech?). That would seem to be what she should aim for, rather than lamenting that American taxpayers continue get some very limited say into how their own tax dollars are spent. That she’s blind to the notion that millions of Americans view abortion as a tragic loss of life makes the rest of her writing lose a whole lot of credibility.
That’s an odd take on this story. The point is that the PLGHA removes overseas funding for (say) malaria prevention if the government involved fails to follow the US govt line on abortion. You may be (you probably are!) against your tax dollars being used to help out people in Colombia, but it’s not a simple question of ‘why should the US fund abortions abroad’. They don’t have to, obviously.
When you accept govt funding, you also accept the conditions that accompany the funds. It’s how malaria gets tied to abortion. There is an alternative, of course – do fundraising so that the people sympathetic to the cause put their own money where their mouths are.
Well, yes it is a simple question. The US federal government does not fund abortions for Americans but it is supposed to in Columbia, where rape is apparently widespread and unpunished?
The idea seems to be that if a country is rich and well organized it must be at the expense of the poor & badly organized , so they ‘owe’ them as somehow responsible for both their problems & their inability to fix them.
The (possible?) nexus between the prohibition of use of US aid to an organization that provides/refers abortions and the claim that somehow this resulted in cessation of malaria aid was not clear in this article. I tried to parse it out carefully but it seems like there’s just this jump. I’d like to have that part spelled out, with fair consideration as to whether it’s feasible for anti-malaria groups to distance themselves from abortion providers. Seems like it wouldn’t be that hard so I don’t understand why malaria relief was denied.
I’m supportive of aid going to prevent malaria and things such as that. And of course I have no issue with women getting counseling and birth control. And I sure as hell hate rape. So I’m able to be persuaded but this article didn’t do so. The bulk of the article is about a country in a long-term crisis where paramilitaries rule instead of rule-of-law, the economy sucks, and rape and unplanned pregnancies are far too common. Then all these raging entrenched problems are somehow harnessed to the fact that the US aid became more tightly conditioned on not recipients not providing abortions or referring for abortion. Meanwhile, no one featured in the article tried to get an abortion and couldn’t because of the US.
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago
Why doesn’t Colombia pay for abortion for Columbians? Seems like that would be the solution.
Because in 2021 equity requires that rich Americans pay to abort the foetuses of poor Columbian women? It’s getting really hard to keep track of the arguments…
That’s a bit more complicated. Some women cannot carry a child, it’s not always a vanity type “I don’t want to be pregnant” thing. Although the latter is common among Hollywood celebs, most women who use a surrogate cannot sustain a pregnancy themselves.
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
Ah, the abortion sacrament, as fundamental to the left as hating Israel and guns. The US should have no role at all regarding abortions in other nations, but this disingenuous article and its fixation on Trump ignores what has happened for a long time: Dem presidents are all for using American taxpayer funding for abortions abroad and Repub presidents oppose it. There is nothing unique about Trump in this matter.
Michael Walsh
3 years ago
I am disappointed to see such a whiny piece of special-pleading and groupthink in Unherd. The reflexive anti-Trumpism underscores the ideological blindness of this person. Her progressivist solipsism -as shameless as it is hypocritical- is rooted in a profound bigotry, assuming full (American) responsibility for other’s choices, so denying them the very agency porgressivists claim to defend.
Last edited 3 years ago by Michael Walsh
James Rowlands
3 years ago
“Pro choice,….. pro choice”
Pro-choice means a woman’s choice of an abortion only. There is no room in the “pro choice” movement for equal time for those who chose to not have an abortion and want to talk about that choice or others who want to save the lives of unborn babies and also talk about that subject. Why can’t the pro-choice movement be honest and call itself the pro-abortion movement? What are they ashamed of using a name which tells the world what they are really all about?
Pro-life supporters are not invited to speak at pro-choice rallies, publish pro-life articles in pro-choice publications, or have any leadership roles in the pro-choice movement. The pro-choice movement is even against counseling women about to have an abortion to reconsider.
The pro-life movement by it’s definition is for the life of both the mother and the baby. No pro-life supporters want to harm a woman’s health, life, or take away the right of an unborn baby or it’s mother to live. Pro-choice supporters are welcome to pro-life rallies if they support the rights of the unborn to live and not be killed by being murdered in an abortion clinic. In truth the pro-life folks are the real pro-choice people. They chose life every time.
Lastly.Why isn’t the man who’s sperm fertilized the egg of the woman he impregnanted not allowed any say whatsoever when the mother of his baby wants to murder his child? Why isn’t the father’s right to have his choice in the saving the life of his unborn baby part of the abortion issue? Somehow the father only becomes part of the abortion story only if the woman decides to have a baby and at then at the moment of birth the man suddenly has the financial responsibilty to support the baby he was not allowed part “ownership” of when it was his sperm that initiated the creation of the same baby while it was in the womb of the baby’s mother.
There are a lot of choices about abortion the pro-choice movement wants to avoid including the most important choice of all. The choice of an unborn baby to want to be born which we can assume would be YES!
Wow, wow! James: men’s and women’s reproductive roles and therefore reproductive rights are neither symmetrical nor comparable. What is a man’s investment in having children that entitles him to have a say about whether a pregnancy will continue or not? Having an orgasm? Sperm is cheap; spreading sperm is easy, and that’s the reproductive right men like to have (and are naturally programmed for, apparently), and the one they sometimes practice by force, as in this Colombian story (=rape). Woman’s investment in reproduction is 9 months of pregnancy, childbirth (a tough gig, James, even deadly sometimes, FYI), breasfeeding, mothering for 20 years or so. It is by no means rare, in any country, that fathers decide caring for children they happened to have created is not something they can be bothered with; even when they are married to their mothers, let alone when they are not. Often, men have children without even knowing it – and are proud of it. Get real!
So lets see society derides and admonishes men who desert their known, or maybe barely known, issue and all the knock on effects that brings. Then Val Colic-Peisker derides and admonishes a man who want to have a say in their child’s life from conception. All those things you quote as womens ‘investment in reproduction’ are a lot earier to navigate with a dedicated partner by your side who assists with the material as well as all the other life changes having a child brings. Thank you for your thoughful comment James Rowlands
Thank you. The driver I think of all of this is the denial of complementarity, by feminists. This implies that neither men nor women contribute anything unique to raising a child simply because of gender. It is an assertion that male and female parents are interchangeable components in child-rearing. In practice, this means that fathers are separated from their children. Men are told so often that a father contributes nothing essential to the child that his mother is also not capable of contributing. So he loses yet one more compelling reason to stay. After all, everything “will be fine” if he leaves – or if he was never there in the first place.
“What is a man’s investment in having children that entitles him to have a say about whether a pregnancy will continue or not? “
it’s his child, of course. Not that rapists in Colombia would likely care much about a child. “It is by no means rare, in any country, that fathers decide caring for children they happened to have created is not something they can be bothered with” this is true for women as well. They give up babies for adoption all the time.
James, are you saying that pro-choice supporters are invited to speak at pro-life rallies, to publish pro-choice articles in pro-life publications, and/or to have leadership roles in the pro-life movement?
And isn’t the pro-life movement *against* counselling women about possibly considering an abortion?
The way I understand, “pro-choice” means there is a choice whether to keep the baby or not, while “pro-life” always means “no other choice but to keep it, regardless of circumstance” – which means that there is no room in the “pro-life” movement *not only* for “equal time” for those who might choose to have an abortion and want to talk about that choice, but there is, in fact, *zero* time for them.
Is my perception wrong?
As you correctly say. Abortion ( pro choice) is intended to give adults the ability to accept or reject the responsibilities of parenthood.
Pro choice therefore, does not care of course whether the child is viable, or an actual person, or a living human being. It is all about freeing adults from the specter of imposed obligation. Sex traditionally comes with imposed obligations. The sexual revolution did away with all that – and the consequences are all around us.
What you are talking about, is the ideal world, where 100% of people would be responsible adults, who (1) carefully consider all the possible consequences of their actions before embarking on them (which includes all forms of sex), and (2) when they make mistakes, they take full responsibility for them, regardless of the magnitude of the associated costs.
If the world were like this, then I would agree with you. Sadly, our current world is VERY FAR from ideal, therefore the rules, by which we choose to run our societies, *must* take those imperfections into account – which unfortunately means that there are a number things that must be done that many of us would find deeply unpalatable. So given that, what do you suggest? That societies should be run *as if* the world were perfect? (which, BTW, would mean disbanding the army, the police, the justice system – because after a careful consideration, no rational human being would do anything to hurt another living human being)
You are correct that abortion frees adults from the specter of imposed obligation. But on the other hand, denying abortion oftentimes imposes obligation on *other* people (who didn’t even get the pleasure of the orgasm, during which that baby was conceived).
The cost of an abortion can range anywhere from $0-$1,000, but the cost of upbringing a child for 18 years is a few hundred thousand $. And if they grow up to be dysfunctional adults, then the lifetime cost of supporting them can easily exceed $1 million each. Who do you think pays that price? Their single mothers clearly don’t have that kind of money! Consequently, people, who had played absolutely no role in creating this problem (and had no say in possibly preventing it), get stuck with child support and alimony for the pregnancy that they had zero role in causing, and zero personal knowledge about it even having happened. Is this fair? Isn’t this *also* “freeing certain adults from obligation”, and offloading that obligation onto the completely innocent strangers?
Furthermore, the statistics show that children, who grew up in a single-mother household without a strong father figure in the home, tend to much more likely to become criminals – which even further increases their cost on the society (both financial, and in terms of overall quality of life for everybody).
To make it clear: there are NO “good” options in case of unwanted pregnancy, therefore the question “what to do about it?” comes down to “choosing the lesser of the available evils”, and given the above considerations, terminating an unwanted pregnancy seems to be a lot less societally-damaging than other available alternatives.
Apart from the LOL “the cost of upbringing a child for 18 years is a few hundred thousand $” (Most parents in this world do not have $1000 but bring their kids up quite well)
Lets be clear that the obligation that you want to prevent by promoting infanticide is your financial obligation. If that is your issue then promote marriage and morality. The current system that penalises marriage and family, creating depended groups, is financially unsustainable (as you point out) anyway. Therefore the question for the future is not whether morality will be imposed, but which morality will be imposed. Christian or Muslim.
I’m specifically talking about a young girl, who is facing the prospect of raising a child alone, and whose professional qualifications are so poor, that she might be able to support herself working in low-paid jobs, but there is no way she could earn enough to support her and the child, including paying for daycare (because alternatively, she’d have to stay with a child at home – in which case he can’t work, and can’t earn anything). This can oftentimes cause that girl to abandon her plans to attend University, thus likely putting the rest of her working-age life into the low-earning pathway.
I’m not sure what exactly you meant by “Let’s be clear that the obligation that you want to prevent by promoting infanticide is your financial obligation.” If you are implying that I’m absconding from my obligations to raise my own children, then you are wrong. And if by that you mean to say that it is my obligation to financially support ill choices of other people, then yes, I most certainly consider this imposition to be unfair.
As for “If that is your issue then promote marriage and morality”, yes I agree. But I’m not god, and there is only so much (and woefully not enough) that a single person can do to change this situation in any significant way. That said, letting a large number of children grow up in single-parent families (hence with dysfunctional families being the ONLY role model that they are familiar with), *clearly* moves the needle in the *opposite* direction from “promoting marriage and morality” – would you disagree with this statement?
And this means that even though you quite obviously feel strongly about promoting marriage and morality, *some* of the actions you’ve chosen (esp. your pro-life activism) are actually pushing things in the *opposite* direction, by *increasing* the number of people who see no value in marriage and morality. How do you reconcile this internal contradiction? In other words: what’s more important to you: (1) to *signal* your virtues (while causing the opposite outcomes), or (2) to achieve virtuous *results* while appearing “less virtuous”?
As for “which morality will be imposed”, there are actually not 2, but 3 contenders: Christian, Muslim and Marxist, and while the threat of the latter two is significant, they operate on different time scales: Islamist morality takes over the countries by “demographic numbers” (which means that it will take them at least a few generations before their numbers reach the critical point of no return). Marxism, on the other hand, is able to corrupt the minds of the *existing* population within a single generation (and by now they are really close to winning, at least in the US).
All of this means that at first, it will be the Marxist morality that will take over the country, but eventually, once demography catches up, Islam will take control permanently.
BTW, Christian morality will NOT be gaining ground if the abolition of abortion causes more Marxist supporters to be born (which, I suspect, is what you believe). Currently, it is overwhelmingly the future Marxists that are being aborted (because it is against the Christian and Muslim beliefs to choose to do so); and Marxism is the more imminent of the two main threats to Christianity. So as the saying goes, “Never Interfere With an Enemy While He’s in the Process of Destroying Himself”.
“this can oftentimes cause that girl to abandon her plans to attend University, thus likely putting the rest of her working-age life into the low-earning pathway.”
Lets be clear here. The difference between graduates and non graduates if loans are taken into consideration is declining fast. State (non) jobs still employ a lot of graduates where entry is the key, but outside of this sector, skills and experience are what matters.
“abolition of abortion causes more Marxist supporters to be born”
That is not a given, or Hartipool would be Marxist. BTW, I thought it was only Chrstians that believed in original sin…..
If your wife or perhaps your married daughter had the misfortune to be raped, do you seriously believe they should be forced to carry the resulting baby to full term and that the rapist- if he could be identified – should have any say at all in this outcome of his crime?
To be pro choice doesn’t mean that abortion becomes compulsory! Abortion is available in this country yet thousands of babies are born here every year.
Ah the rape thing. 99.6 to 99.8% are not conceived from rape
Do we decide policy on 0.2%? OK. Let’s agree that rape is excepted. That would mean around 99.7% of babies saved. I could support that.
Why can’t pro-life supporters just be honest and say that they are anti-abortion? Most of the unwanted pregnancies that they support end in unwanted children whose lives are not valued by anyone. Anti-abortionists are only interested in the theoretical life of the unborn and don’t give a damn about the lives of those children once born. Neither do they care about the unfortunate reluctant mothers whose lives may have been greatly improved if they were allowed the choice to remain childless at that stage.
“Neither do they care about the unfortunate reluctant mothers whose lives may have been greatly improved if they were allowed the choice to remain childless at that stage.” They were allowed the choice. They elected not to make it.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
Well the US now has a govt that is fanatically pro-abortion so I don’t suppose this will be a problem any more.
Dawne Swift
3 years ago
This article conflates violence against women (including rape) with its potential consequence of pregnancy. A great example of trying to smear Trump’s policies to trim bloated overseas aid budgets with the implication that if the money was still being spent, the violence against women (nothing whatsoever to do with US policies) would cease.
As a woman, the fundamental question to me is – are these rape survivors sorry that their babies survived? Do they regret the children, as opposed to regretting the circumstances of their conception? This was not discussed in the article and we can probably guess why.
Dan Martin
3 years ago
This article just makes me sad. The question-begging assumption that abortion is a positive good is astounding. There is no acknowledgement that the killing of unborn humans is at the very least problematic. That someone such as the author could exist in a world where the fetus is marginalized as just an obstacle to women’s rights is gravely troubling.
Most articles on abortion are like this, aren’t they? They tend to shy away from the difficult ethical questions, and are merely a form of mood music. Abortion is shown to be the “solution” to some specific evil or other (rape; poverty; political instability…) in the hope that the reader will come to see abortion as a vaguely good thing if only they read enough articles.
JP Martin
3 years ago
Many would argue that abortion is also a form of violence against women.
Are you saying that abortions are forcefully IMPOSED on the women who want to KEEP the baby? It has always been my impression that abortion was performed only when a woman WANTED it?
Or when those who have power over her want it.
Millions of women have been bullied into abortions by husbands, fathers, bosses, “boyfriends”, pimps, and governments. (The “one-child” policy in China included compulsory abortion for any pregnant woman who’d had a child.)
Sex-selective abortion is often at the insistence of the husband who wants only sons.
I was talking mainly about democratic countries, like the US. As for *why* a mother would choose to terminate her pregnancy in a democratic country, there is a huge number of possible reasons and factors influencing this decision – which of course includes pressure from other people in their lives. The only type of abortion that was clearly *against* mother’s decision, is if she’s forcefully snatched, kicking and screaming, and the abortion is performed despite all the physical resistance she could muster – in which case a number of *other* criminal laws get violated (assault, kidnapping, etc.).
A lot of people choose to pay taxes and obey a number of other laws that they personally might disagree with because they’d been bullied or intimidated into doing so. Is this kind of choice “valid”? I guess so, because it’s so common in so many different aspects of life. Pressure from other people being a reason for a woman to decide or agree to an abortion is not fundamentally different from making many other types of decisions in life.
“Pressure from other people being a reason for a woman to decide or agree to an abortion is not fundamentally different from making many other types of decisions in life.”
Undoubtedly true. But this in no way obligates anyone else to pay for an abortion.
But they are enforced on the unborn child, violently, roughly half of whom are women.
William MacDougall
3 years ago
That the elected government in the US might want to control how US taxpayers’ money is spent on abortions and abortion propaganda in Colombia hardly means the “US controls reproductive rights”. Colombia is a sovereign nation which can spend its own money as it likes, but of course there will be restrictions on how it spends money from abroad.
Kelly Mitchell
3 years ago
Bullshit story. The US is one of 3 nations that allows 3rd trimester abortions (China and N. Korea are the others.) The US has a very pro-abortion policy. HORSE CRAP!
Fredrick Urbanelli
3 years ago
The melodramatic and hectoring tone of Ms. Filipovic’s writing nearly succeeds in concealing the illogic of this article. She claims correctly that conservative political forces in the US are opposed to paying for abortions in foreign countries. The fact that some of these countries are torn by political strife is unfortunate but not relevant. The question is, should Americans facilitate and pay for women in other countries to eliminate their children with the implicit understanding that this will improve their lives and their futures when this understanding is not in any way proven to be true? Is this not one of the most extreme examples of imperialism imaginable? Not to mention racism, white supremacy and the whole glossary of the left. I’m afraid that the only effect that this will have is to appease American feminists with extreme pro-abortion stances. And this appeasement will be temporary, because they’re certain to find more fetuses in more countries that need to go. It’s not up to American taxpayers to take the responsibility of deciding who will live and who will die. This is playing God by remote control.
Richard Pearse
3 years ago
What a bizarre article. Colombia has a rape culture (especially for poor women from small towns) and it’s Trump’s fault???! Unherd finds a pro-abortion, anti-American who demands that American taxpayers (at least half of which are against abortion under most circumstances) make amends for Columbia’s rape epidemic.
A clever attempt to spin what’s really going on, but, not.
Birth control and abortion for the 3rd world is the best way to spend American/European taxpayer money. Those people migrate and they come to USA and EU. And those religious people don’t want those migrants.
Trump is too weak to ignore the religious nutters.
Last edited 3 years ago by Jeremy Smith
johnmckenna538
3 years ago
Let’s be balanced here . The other side of the argument have also poured money , people and time spreading their influence globally including the Clinton Foundation , Rockefeller Foundation and others . It is a recorded fact that Soros and his people helped the pro repeal. lobby in the Irish Referendum. Just saying .
Mikey Mike
3 years ago
I’m always concerned when an article begins with the euphemism “reproductive rights” to describe terminating pregnancies (another euphemism, if you ask me, though “killing babies in utero” might be too loaded). It usually betrays the author’s desire to gloss over the horror of abortion. There isn’t a lot of poorly written drivel published on Unherd – and I totally understand the need to publish *some* for a reminder of the stark contrast between drivel and smart exposition – but I think this one takes it too far.
Clare Webber
3 years ago
If a woman wants to end her pregnancy, birth does that. Why must the baby come out dead? No, it’s not just the pregnancy she wants to end; it’s her child’s life mainly.
I think it’s quite obvious that unless the pregnancy *itself* poses major health risk to the mother’s body, the main reason why a woman wants to end her pregnancy, is NOT because “once the pregnancy is over, the problem will be gone”.
Abortion is under consideration *only* when there is NOT a single person in the whole world who is willing to step forward and say “I’m the person who wants to feed and raise and pay for the full upkeep of this particular future baby until he/she is at least 18 years old”. So if the mother doesn’t want to do this, then *who* will be that person? You? If not you nor anybody else, then WHAT would you suggest to do with a newly-born unwanted baby? Throw him/her “into the bushes” to die slowly of starvation? Clearly, this would be *the worst* (and the *least* humane) option.
To make it clear: there are NO “good” options in case of unwanted pregnancy, therefore the question “what to do about it?” comes down to “choosing the lesser of the available evils”, and given the above considerations, terminating an unwanted pregnancy seems to be a lot less societally-damaging than other available alternatives.
“So if the mother doesn’t want to do this, then *who* will be that person?”
ever heard of adoption? “If not you nor anybody else, then WHAT would you suggest to do with a newly-born unwanted baby?” put the baby up for adoption.
Since you have not come forward to say you will find a migrant child being held on the Texas border and raise it to adulthood, and since we can’t turn them back into the desert to die slowly of starvation, it seems we are left with only one solution, hmnn?
Don’t post comments like that. There are smart people on this forum who can offer interesting analysis. Don’t distract from their efforts with comments that belong on the FB feed of you sister-in-law.
It is endlessly interesting to me how pregnancy is treated as a peculiar misfortune which mysteriously befalls some women without their knowing. You sort of have to believe that too. I’m mean, how else could you justify slicing a writhing baby to bits with a sharp instrument inside the mother’s womb?
Hamish McDougal
3 years ago
Yes, it’s (always and everything and everywhere) Trump’s fault.
Mikey Mike
3 years ago
That rocked. It was like time-traveling to the lecture hall of sociology 101 my freshman year in college. I happened to be seated next to a sophomore who, in her first year at a state university, had become the wisest 19-year-old in the world. She sounded just like that.
Jeremy Smith
3 years ago
Religious conservatives (especially evangelicals) in USA are the thickest people in the planet. Who has abortions in USA? Minorities! The best way to keep America white (yes evangelical morons!) is to have a liberal abortion policy.
What part of the world has fast population growth? Africa and the Muslims. And those people migrate. Give them as much free birth control (and abortions) as possible.
Traditionally the parties in the USA are divided on the issue of abortion. The Democrats favour a liberal agenda and the Republicans favour a prolife position. It is to his credit, whatever else you may say about Trump, that he tried to stop the unnecessary slaughter of countless unborn children and he was the first USA president to address a prolife life rally, events which are often censored by the liberal media. About 50 million unborn children are subject to the horrors of death by abortion worldwide every year. And China had until recently a policy of forced abortion, leaving many mothers in a desperate state as they mourned the terrible loss of life of their children. It’s ironic too how many European countries bemoan the fact that there are not enough children to maintain their demographics but never make the connection to the fact that they are killing so many of their own unborn children.
Simon Cooper
3 years ago
That was a lot of words to say two things:
Orange man bad. (and his policies)
Abortion good. (despite the death of the innocents involved).
Saw a Charlie Kirk video last night with a great one-liner.
It’s not your DNA it’s not your body.
gotmike365
3 years ago
You can count the number of pro-life ambassadors Bill Clinton appointed on one hand (probably no hands outside of the one for the Vatican). This article is so one-sided.
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SubscribeWhy is it America’s responsibility to pay for abortions in other countries? I would understand if America was actively interfering, but all America is choosing to do is to determine what their grants can go to. If other countries want to help out or NGOs want to have their own health programs, I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the idea that America has some special obligation to spend its money the exact way the author wants or that abortion is a special “human right” that is owed to them.
You could do what Blackmun did and just start making things up.
It’s not America’s responsibility, you’re right. I happen to be an American being taxed for these grants and would rather I didn’t contribute to abortion anywhere. The author has a strange point in the middle of the article where she states that other countries stepped up to provide for stable funding of abortions (somehow related to free speech?). That would seem to be what she should aim for, rather than lamenting that American taxpayers continue get some very limited say into how their own tax dollars are spent. That she’s blind to the notion that millions of Americans view abortion as a tragic loss of life makes the rest of her writing lose a whole lot of credibility.
That’s an odd take on this story. The point is that the PLGHA removes overseas funding for (say) malaria prevention if the government involved fails to follow the US govt line on abortion. You may be (you probably are!) against your tax dollars being used to help out people in Colombia, but it’s not a simple question of ‘why should the US fund abortions abroad’. They don’t have to, obviously.
When you accept govt funding, you also accept the conditions that accompany the funds. It’s how malaria gets tied to abortion. There is an alternative, of course – do fundraising so that the people sympathetic to the cause put their own money where their mouths are.
Well, yes it is a simple question. The US federal government does not fund abortions for Americans but it is supposed to in Columbia, where rape is apparently widespread and unpunished?
The idea seems to be that if a country is rich and well organized it must be at the expense of the poor & badly organized , so they ‘owe’ them as somehow responsible for both their problems & their inability to fix them.
The (possible?) nexus between the prohibition of use of US aid to an organization that provides/refers abortions and the claim that somehow this resulted in cessation of malaria aid was not clear in this article. I tried to parse it out carefully but it seems like there’s just this jump. I’d like to have that part spelled out, with fair consideration as to whether it’s feasible for anti-malaria groups to distance themselves from abortion providers. Seems like it wouldn’t be that hard so I don’t understand why malaria relief was denied.
I’m supportive of aid going to prevent malaria and things such as that. And of course I have no issue with women getting counseling and birth control. And I sure as hell hate rape. So I’m able to be persuaded but this article didn’t do so. The bulk of the article is about a country in a long-term crisis where paramilitaries rule instead of rule-of-law, the economy sucks, and rape and unplanned pregnancies are far too common. Then all these raging entrenched problems are somehow harnessed to the fact that the US aid became more tightly conditioned on not recipients not providing abortions or referring for abortion. Meanwhile, no one featured in the article tried to get an abortion and couldn’t because of the US.
Why doesn’t Colombia pay for abortion for Columbians? Seems like that would be the solution.
Because in 2021 equity requires that rich Americans pay to abort the foetuses of poor Columbian women? It’s getting really hard to keep track of the arguments…
And rich Americans pay surragates to have their children.
That’s a bit more complicated. Some women cannot carry a child, it’s not always a vanity type “I don’t want to be pregnant” thing. Although the latter is common among Hollywood celebs, most women who use a surrogate cannot sustain a pregnancy themselves.
Ah, the abortion sacrament, as fundamental to the left as hating Israel and guns. The US should have no role at all regarding abortions in other nations, but this disingenuous article and its fixation on Trump ignores what has happened for a long time: Dem presidents are all for using American taxpayer funding for abortions abroad and Repub presidents oppose it. There is nothing unique about Trump in this matter.
I am disappointed to see such a whiny piece of special-pleading and groupthink in Unherd. The reflexive anti-Trumpism underscores the ideological blindness of this person. Her progressivist solipsism -as shameless as it is hypocritical- is rooted in a profound bigotry, assuming full (American) responsibility for other’s choices, so denying them the very agency porgressivists claim to defend.
“Pro choice,….. pro choice”
Pro-choice means a woman’s choice of an abortion only. There is no room in the “pro choice” movement for equal time for those who chose to not have an abortion and want to talk about that choice or others who want to save the lives of unborn babies and also talk about that subject. Why can’t the pro-choice movement be honest and call itself the pro-abortion movement? What are they ashamed of using a name which tells the world what they are really all about?
Pro-life supporters are not invited to speak at pro-choice rallies, publish pro-life articles in pro-choice publications, or have any leadership roles in the pro-choice movement. The pro-choice movement is even against counseling women about to have an abortion to reconsider.
The pro-life movement by it’s definition is for the life of both the mother and the baby. No pro-life supporters want to harm a woman’s health, life, or take away the right of an unborn baby or it’s mother to live. Pro-choice supporters are welcome to pro-life rallies if they support the rights of the unborn to live and not be killed by being murdered in an abortion clinic. In truth the pro-life folks are the real pro-choice people. They chose life every time.
Lastly.Why isn’t the man who’s sperm fertilized the egg of the woman he impregnanted not allowed any say whatsoever when the mother of his baby wants to murder his child? Why isn’t the father’s right to have his choice in the saving the life of his unborn baby part of the abortion issue? Somehow the father only becomes part of the abortion story only if the woman decides to have a baby and at then at the moment of birth the man suddenly has the financial responsibilty to support the baby he was not allowed part “ownership” of when it was his sperm that initiated the creation of the same baby while it was in the womb of the baby’s mother.
There are a lot of choices about abortion the pro-choice movement wants to avoid including the most important choice of all. The choice of an unborn baby to want to be born which we can assume would be YES!
Wow, wow! James: men’s and women’s reproductive roles and therefore reproductive rights are neither symmetrical nor comparable. What is a man’s investment in having children that entitles him to have a say about whether a pregnancy will continue or not? Having an orgasm? Sperm is cheap; spreading sperm is easy, and that’s the reproductive right men like to have (and are naturally programmed for, apparently), and the one they sometimes practice by force, as in this Colombian story (=rape). Woman’s investment in reproduction is 9 months of pregnancy, childbirth (a tough gig, James, even deadly sometimes, FYI), breasfeeding, mothering for 20 years or so. It is by no means rare, in any country, that fathers decide caring for children they happened to have created is not something they can be bothered with; even when they are married to their mothers, let alone when they are not. Often, men have children without even knowing it – and are proud of it. Get real!
So lets see society derides and admonishes men who desert their known, or maybe barely known, issue and all the knock on effects that brings. Then Val Colic-Peisker derides and admonishes a man who want to have a say in their child’s life from conception. All those things you quote as womens ‘investment in reproduction’ are a lot earier to navigate with a dedicated partner by your side who assists with the material as well as all the other life changes having a child brings. Thank you for your thoughful comment James Rowlands
Thank you. The driver I think of all of this is the denial of complementarity, by feminists. This implies that neither men nor women contribute anything unique to raising a child simply because of gender. It is an assertion that male and female parents are interchangeable components in child-rearing. In practice, this means that fathers are separated from their children. Men are told so often that a father contributes nothing essential to the child that his mother is also not capable of contributing. So he loses yet one more compelling reason to stay. After all, everything “will be fine” if he leaves – or if he was never there in the first place.
Would you have a baby as a result of a pack rape?
“What is a man’s investment in having children that entitles him to have a say about whether a pregnancy will continue or not? “
it’s his child, of course. Not that rapists in Colombia would likely care much about a child.
“It is by no means rare, in any country, that fathers decide caring for children they happened to have created is not something they can be bothered with”
this is true for women as well. They give up babies for adoption all the time.
James, are you saying that pro-choice supporters are invited to speak at pro-life rallies, to publish pro-choice articles in pro-life publications, and/or to have leadership roles in the pro-life movement?
And isn’t the pro-life movement *against* counselling women about possibly considering an abortion?
The way I understand, “pro-choice” means there is a choice whether to keep the baby or not, while “pro-life” always means “no other choice but to keep it, regardless of circumstance” – which means that there is no room in the “pro-life” movement *not only* for “equal time” for those who might choose to have an abortion and want to talk about that choice, but there is, in fact, *zero* time for them.
Is my perception wrong?
As you correctly say. Abortion ( pro choice) is intended to give adults the ability to accept or reject the responsibilities of parenthood.
Pro choice therefore, does not care of course whether the child is viable, or an actual person, or a living human being. It is all about freeing adults from the specter of imposed obligation. Sex traditionally comes with imposed obligations. The sexual revolution did away with all that – and the consequences are all around us.
What you are talking about, is the ideal world, where 100% of people would be responsible adults, who (1) carefully consider all the possible consequences of their actions before embarking on them (which includes all forms of sex), and (2) when they make mistakes, they take full responsibility for them, regardless of the magnitude of the associated costs.
If the world were like this, then I would agree with you. Sadly, our current world is VERY FAR from ideal, therefore the rules, by which we choose to run our societies, *must* take those imperfections into account – which unfortunately means that there are a number things that must be done that many of us would find deeply unpalatable. So given that, what do you suggest? That societies should be run *as if* the world were perfect? (which, BTW, would mean disbanding the army, the police, the justice system – because after a careful consideration, no rational human being would do anything to hurt another living human being)
You are correct that abortion frees adults from the specter of imposed obligation. But on the other hand, denying abortion oftentimes imposes obligation on *other* people (who didn’t even get the pleasure of the orgasm, during which that baby was conceived).
The cost of an abortion can range anywhere from $0-$1,000, but the cost of upbringing a child for 18 years is a few hundred thousand $. And if they grow up to be dysfunctional adults, then the lifetime cost of supporting them can easily exceed $1 million each. Who do you think pays that price? Their single mothers clearly don’t have that kind of money! Consequently, people, who had played absolutely no role in creating this problem (and had no say in possibly preventing it), get stuck with child support and alimony for the pregnancy that they had zero role in causing, and zero personal knowledge about it even having happened. Is this fair? Isn’t this *also* “freeing certain adults from obligation”, and offloading that obligation onto the completely innocent strangers?
Furthermore, the statistics show that children, who grew up in a single-mother household without a strong father figure in the home, tend to much more likely to become criminals – which even further increases their cost on the society (both financial, and in terms of overall quality of life for everybody).
To make it clear: there are NO “good” options in case of unwanted pregnancy, therefore the question “what to do about it?” comes down to “choosing the lesser of the available evils”, and given the above considerations, terminating an unwanted pregnancy seems to be a lot less societally-damaging than other available alternatives.
Apart from the LOL “the cost of upbringing a child for 18 years is a few hundred thousand $” (Most parents in this world do not have $1000 but bring their kids up quite well)
Lets be clear that the obligation that you want to prevent by promoting infanticide is your financial obligation. If that is your issue then promote marriage and morality. The current system that penalises marriage and family, creating depended groups, is financially unsustainable (as you point out) anyway. Therefore the question for the future is not whether morality will be imposed, but which morality will be imposed. Christian or Muslim.
I’m specifically talking about a young girl, who is facing the prospect of raising a child alone, and whose professional qualifications are so poor, that she might be able to support herself working in low-paid jobs, but there is no way she could earn enough to support her and the child, including paying for daycare (because alternatively, she’d have to stay with a child at home – in which case he can’t work, and can’t earn anything). This can oftentimes cause that girl to abandon her plans to attend University, thus likely putting the rest of her working-age life into the low-earning pathway.
I’m not sure what exactly you meant by “Let’s be clear that the obligation that you want to prevent by promoting infanticide is your financial obligation.” If you are implying that I’m absconding from my obligations to raise my own children, then you are wrong. And if by that you mean to say that it is my obligation to financially support ill choices of other people, then yes, I most certainly consider this imposition to be unfair.
As for “If that is your issue then promote marriage and morality”, yes I agree. But I’m not god, and there is only so much (and woefully not enough) that a single person can do to change this situation in any significant way. That said, letting a large number of children grow up in single-parent families (hence with dysfunctional families being the ONLY role model that they are familiar with), *clearly* moves the needle in the *opposite* direction from “promoting marriage and morality” – would you disagree with this statement?
And this means that even though you quite obviously feel strongly about promoting marriage and morality, *some* of the actions you’ve chosen (esp. your pro-life activism) are actually pushing things in the *opposite* direction, by *increasing* the number of people who see no value in marriage and morality. How do you reconcile this internal contradiction? In other words: what’s more important to you: (1) to *signal* your virtues (while causing the opposite outcomes), or (2) to achieve virtuous *results* while appearing “less virtuous”?
As for “which morality will be imposed”, there are actually not 2, but 3 contenders: Christian, Muslim and Marxist, and while the threat of the latter two is significant, they operate on different time scales: Islamist morality takes over the countries by “demographic numbers” (which means that it will take them at least a few generations before their numbers reach the critical point of no return). Marxism, on the other hand, is able to corrupt the minds of the *existing* population within a single generation (and by now they are really close to winning, at least in the US).
All of this means that at first, it will be the Marxist morality that will take over the country, but eventually, once demography catches up, Islam will take control permanently.
BTW, Christian morality will NOT be gaining ground if the abolition of abortion causes more Marxist supporters to be born (which, I suspect, is what you believe). Currently, it is overwhelmingly the future Marxists that are being aborted (because it is against the Christian and Muslim beliefs to choose to do so); and Marxism is the more imminent of the two main threats to Christianity. So as the saying goes, “Never Interfere With an Enemy While He’s in the Process of Destroying Himself”.
“this can oftentimes cause that girl to abandon her plans to attend University, thus likely putting the rest of her working-age life into the low-earning pathway.”
Lets be clear here. The difference between graduates and non graduates if loans are taken into consideration is declining fast. State (non) jobs still employ a lot of graduates where entry is the key, but outside of this sector, skills and experience are what matters.
“abolition of abortion causes more Marxist supporters to be born”
That is not a given, or Hartipool would be Marxist. BTW, I thought it was only Chrstians that believed in original sin…..
If your wife or perhaps your married daughter had the misfortune to be raped, do you seriously believe they should be forced to carry the resulting baby to full term and that the rapist- if he could be identified – should have any say at all in this outcome of his crime?
To be pro choice doesn’t mean that abortion becomes compulsory! Abortion is available in this country yet thousands of babies are born here every year.
Ah the rape thing. 99.6 to 99.8% are not conceived from rape
Do we decide policy on 0.2%? OK. Let’s agree that rape is excepted. That would mean around 99.7% of babies saved. I could support that.
Why can’t pro-life supporters just be honest and say that they are anti-abortion? Most of the unwanted pregnancies that they support end in unwanted children whose lives are not valued by anyone. Anti-abortionists are only interested in the theoretical life of the unborn and don’t give a damn about the lives of those children once born. Neither do they care about the unfortunate reluctant mothers whose lives may have been greatly improved if they were allowed the choice to remain childless at that stage.
“Neither do they care about the unfortunate reluctant mothers whose lives may have been greatly improved if they were allowed the choice to remain childless at that stage.”
They were allowed the choice. They elected not to make it.
Well the US now has a govt that is fanatically pro-abortion so I don’t suppose this will be a problem any more.
This article conflates violence against women (including rape) with its potential consequence of pregnancy. A great example of trying to smear Trump’s policies to trim bloated overseas aid budgets with the implication that if the money was still being spent, the violence against women (nothing whatsoever to do with US policies) would cease.
As a woman, the fundamental question to me is – are these rape survivors sorry that their babies survived? Do they regret the children, as opposed to regretting the circumstances of their conception? This was not discussed in the article and we can probably guess why.
This article just makes me sad. The question-begging assumption that abortion is a positive good is astounding. There is no acknowledgement that the killing of unborn humans is at the very least problematic. That someone such as the author could exist in a world where the fetus is marginalized as just an obstacle to women’s rights is gravely troubling.
Most articles on abortion are like this, aren’t they? They tend to shy away from the difficult ethical questions, and are merely a form of mood music. Abortion is shown to be the “solution” to some specific evil or other (rape; poverty; political instability…) in the hope that the reader will come to see abortion as a vaguely good thing if only they read enough articles.
Many would argue that abortion is also a form of violence against women.
Are you saying that abortions are forcefully IMPOSED on the women who want to KEEP the baby? It has always been my impression that abortion was performed only when a woman WANTED it?
Or when those who have power over her want it.
Millions of women have been bullied into abortions by husbands, fathers, bosses, “boyfriends”, pimps, and governments. (The “one-child” policy in China included compulsory abortion for any pregnant woman who’d had a child.)
Sex-selective abortion is often at the insistence of the husband who wants only sons.
I was talking mainly about democratic countries, like the US. As for *why* a mother would choose to terminate her pregnancy in a democratic country, there is a huge number of possible reasons and factors influencing this decision – which of course includes pressure from other people in their lives. The only type of abortion that was clearly *against* mother’s decision, is if she’s forcefully snatched, kicking and screaming, and the abortion is performed despite all the physical resistance she could muster – in which case a number of *other* criminal laws get violated (assault, kidnapping, etc.).
A lot of people choose to pay taxes and obey a number of other laws that they personally might disagree with because they’d been bullied or intimidated into doing so. Is this kind of choice “valid”? I guess so, because it’s so common in so many different aspects of life. Pressure from other people being a reason for a woman to decide or agree to an abortion is not fundamentally different from making many other types of decisions in life.
“Pressure from other people being a reason for a woman to decide or agree to an abortion is not fundamentally different from making many other types of decisions in life.”
Undoubtedly true. But this in no way obligates anyone else to pay for an abortion.
Forced abortion is not common (if we exclude China and non-violent forms of coercion) but, by that logic, how would you describe the act of suicide?
I’m not sure what’s your question re: suicide…
Violence isn’t necessarily imposed; people sometimes harm themselves.
You should try giving birth!
Unfortunately the girls that get aborted will never get that chance.
Let’s have a little,perspective, shall we?
What a ridiculous comment. Abortions are not forced upon women violently. They are voluntary.
But they are enforced on the unborn child, violently, roughly half of whom are women.
That the elected government in the US might want to control how US taxpayers’ money is spent on abortions and abortion propaganda in Colombia hardly means the “US controls reproductive rights”. Colombia is a sovereign nation which can spend its own money as it likes, but of course there will be restrictions on how it spends money from abroad.
Bullshit story. The US is one of 3 nations that allows 3rd trimester abortions (China and N. Korea are the others.) The US has a very pro-abortion policy. HORSE CRAP!
The melodramatic and hectoring tone of Ms. Filipovic’s writing nearly succeeds in concealing the illogic of this article. She claims correctly that conservative political forces in the US are opposed to paying for abortions in foreign countries. The fact that some of these countries are torn by political strife is unfortunate but not relevant. The question is, should Americans facilitate and pay for women in other countries to eliminate their children with the implicit understanding that this will improve their lives and their futures when this understanding is not in any way proven to be true? Is this not one of the most extreme examples of imperialism imaginable? Not to mention racism, white supremacy and the whole glossary of the left. I’m afraid that the only effect that this will have is to appease American feminists with extreme pro-abortion stances. And this appeasement will be temporary, because they’re certain to find more fetuses in more countries that need to go. It’s not up to American taxpayers to take the responsibility of deciding who will live and who will die. This is playing God by remote control.
What a bizarre article. Colombia has a rape culture (especially for poor women from small towns) and it’s Trump’s fault???! Unherd finds a pro-abortion, anti-American who demands that American taxpayers (at least half of which are against abortion under most circumstances) make amends for Columbia’s rape epidemic.
A clever attempt to spin what’s really going on, but, not.
Birth control and abortion for the 3rd world is the best way to spend American/European taxpayer money. Those people migrate and they come to USA and EU. And those religious people don’t want those migrants.
Trump is too weak to ignore the religious nutters.
Let’s be balanced here . The other side of the argument have also poured money , people and time spreading their influence globally including the Clinton Foundation , Rockefeller Foundation and others . It is a recorded fact that Soros and his people helped the pro repeal. lobby in the Irish Referendum. Just saying .
I’m always concerned when an article begins with the euphemism “reproductive rights” to describe terminating pregnancies (another euphemism, if you ask me, though “killing babies in utero” might be too loaded). It usually betrays the author’s desire to gloss over the horror of abortion. There isn’t a lot of poorly written drivel published on Unherd – and I totally understand the need to publish *some* for a reminder of the stark contrast between drivel and smart exposition – but I think this one takes it too far.
If a woman wants to end her pregnancy, birth does that. Why must the baby come out dead? No, it’s not just the pregnancy she wants to end; it’s her child’s life mainly.
I think it’s quite obvious that unless the pregnancy *itself* poses major health risk to the mother’s body, the main reason why a woman wants to end her pregnancy, is NOT because “once the pregnancy is over, the problem will be gone”.
Abortion is under consideration *only* when there is NOT a single person in the whole world who is willing to step forward and say “I’m the person who wants to feed and raise and pay for the full upkeep of this particular future baby until he/she is at least 18 years old”. So if the mother doesn’t want to do this, then *who* will be that person? You? If not you nor anybody else, then WHAT would you suggest to do with a newly-born unwanted baby? Throw him/her “into the bushes” to die slowly of starvation? Clearly, this would be *the worst* (and the *least* humane) option.
To make it clear: there are NO “good” options in case of unwanted pregnancy, therefore the question “what to do about it?” comes down to “choosing the lesser of the available evils”, and given the above considerations, terminating an unwanted pregnancy seems to be a lot less societally-damaging than other available alternatives.
“So if the mother doesn’t want to do this, then *who* will be that person?”
ever heard of adoption?
“If not you nor anybody else, then WHAT would you suggest to do with a newly-born unwanted baby?”
put the baby up for adoption.
Since you have not come forward to say you will find a migrant child being held on the Texas border and raise it to adulthood, and since we can’t turn them back into the desert to die slowly of starvation, it seems we are left with only one solution, hmnn?
Don’t post comments like that. There are smart people on this forum who can offer interesting analysis. Don’t distract from their efforts with comments that belong on the FB feed of you sister-in-law.
It is endlessly interesting to me how pregnancy is treated as a peculiar misfortune which mysteriously befalls some women without their knowing. You sort of have to believe that too. I’m mean, how else could you justify slicing a writhing baby to bits with a sharp instrument inside the mother’s womb?
Yes, it’s (always and everything and everywhere) Trump’s fault.
That rocked. It was like time-traveling to the lecture hall of sociology 101 my freshman year in college. I happened to be seated next to a sophomore who, in her first year at a state university, had become the wisest 19-year-old in the world. She sounded just like that.
Religious conservatives (especially evangelicals) in USA are the thickest people in the planet. Who has abortions in USA? Minorities! The best way to keep America white (yes evangelical morons!) is to have a liberal abortion policy.
What part of the world has fast population growth? Africa and the Muslims. And those people migrate. Give them as much free birth control (and abortions) as possible.
They are well aware of the numbers.
Traditionally the parties in the USA are divided on the issue of abortion. The Democrats favour a liberal agenda and the Republicans favour a prolife position. It is to his credit, whatever else you may say about Trump, that he tried to stop the unnecessary slaughter of countless unborn children and he was the first USA president to address a prolife life rally, events which are often censored by the liberal media. About 50 million unborn children are subject to the horrors of death by abortion worldwide every year. And China had until recently a policy of forced abortion, leaving many mothers in a desperate state as they mourned the terrible loss of life of their children. It’s ironic too how many European countries bemoan the fact that there are not enough children to maintain their demographics but never make the connection to the fact that they are killing so many of their own unborn children.
That was a lot of words to say two things:
Orange man bad. (and his policies)
Abortion good. (despite the death of the innocents involved).
Saw a Charlie Kirk video last night with a great one-liner.
It’s not your DNA it’s not your body.
You can count the number of pro-life ambassadors Bill Clinton appointed on one hand (probably no hands outside of the one for the Vatican). This article is so one-sided.