Mexico stands on the edge of a precipice that the United States tumbled off of 50 years ago.
After its Supreme Court ruled this week that federal laws criminalizing abortion were unconstitutional, the court has paved the way for legal abortion throughout the country. Mexico now has its Roe moment, 50 years after the United States took the same dark plunge.
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No doubt many are celebrating this ruling as a landmark victory for women’s rights, but I am begging everyone who will listen: don’t believe it. Don’t fall for the lie of empowerment at the expense of your own children.
Please – consider America’s history of legal abortion as a warning, not an example to follow.
The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass once said that “[w]here justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
While Douglass was challenging a system of racial oppression and inequality, his words speak to this critical moment. When we dehumanize children in the womb and rob them of their right to life, society as a whole will fall apart.
Fifty years ago, activists thought that legal abortion would herald a new dawn of women’s empowerment and equality. Fast-forward to today. After 50 years of legal abortion, the U.S. has the worst maternal mortality rates when compared to other wealthy countries. Women bear the brunt of the hardships of pregnancy, with so many men refusing to support their children or actively pressuring their partners to abort.
What happened? Abortion became the cheap, convenient alternative to our divine mandate of caring for the poor and the vulnerable. Instead of focusing on improving prenatal care, fixing health care deficits, supporting vulnerable mothers, promoting marriage and strengthening the safety net, we simply pointed to abortion as a solution for the “problem” of unexpected motherhood.
READ ALSO: NFL great Benjamin Watson: In a post-Roe world, saving lives starts with changing lives
To “get ahead” in their careers, working women were expected to put motherhood on the back burner to become more profitable for a company’s bottom line. They could pay for expensive daycare – if they could afford it – or just not have kids. Or, they could opt for an abortion.
Worst of all, 65 million Americans who would have been with us have instead had their lives snuffed out in the womb.
The incredible toll of abortion on women is even more pronounced for Black women who have less access to quality preventive and prenatal care and less economic support. Abortion rates are four times higher among American Black women than white women, but we must look beyond that statistic. Maternal mortality rates among Black women are nearly three times those of white women. They are less likely to have quality prenatal care and health insurance. One-third of Black mothers live under the poverty line.
When we consider all this alongside the fact that 76 percent of the women we see at Human Coalition would prefer to parent if their circumstances were different, we can see a new picture. So many women are suffering today under social and economic hardships that pressure them to abort – but abortion solves none of these problems. Women walk out of abortion clinics back into their previous struggles – poverty, unemployment, poor health care, or domestic abuse.
Abortion was promised as a tool of justice and equality. Have you seen our political and social chaos of the last few years? Our social fabric has not been mended after Roe, not by any means. It’s been coming apart at the seams. Because any social solution that involves the killing of innocent human beings will inevitably bring with it contempt, discord, and all the other rotten fruits of injustice.
If we can’t agree on the most basic question of what it means to be human, then our conflicts will multiply and will grow more existential.
A more just society will not come about by compounding injustice. If children in the womb are consigned to mass killing so that we might supposedly alleviate problems of poverty and racism, that’s not justice – that’s eugenics.
Men and women have a right to a basic level of sustenance, employment and care to form thriving families. They have a right to economic opportunity free from discrimination. If this right is thwarted by terrible living conditions that pressure women to abort, the right course of action is to improve these conditions and remove these pressures, not to promote abortion.
The United States has historically been a force for good in so many ways, but our history is also full of incredibly bleak moments. The horrors of chattel slavery, lynchings, eugenics, heinous medical experimentation, and now legal abortion reveal that we have adopted some truly evil ideologies. Now we’ve been promoting abortion internationally as some sick form of progress.
My message to Mexico and all other countries considering legal abortion is this – please take an unflinching look at our history. Don’t listen to the voices of bankrolled activists who are pushing abortion on your country as a necessary step toward women’s empowerment. If you dehumanize an entire class of persons, as Douglass reminds, through legal abortion, “neither persons nor property will be safe.”
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Benjamin Watson is a former NFL player and Super Bowl champion. He is the current vice president of strategic relationships with Human Coalition and authored the book “The New Fight For Life: Roe, Race, and a Pro-Life Commitment to Justice.”
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