As if we needed more evidence that pro-choice means one choice.
An anonymous Reddit user, scaredthrowingaway [1], posted to the online news platform a letter to her unborn baby whom she plans to abort. In the note entitled “I am getting an abortion next Friday. An open letter to the little life I won't get to meet [2],” the young mom wrote, “I am sorry that this is goodbye. I'm sad that I'll never get to meet you.” The media, in typical fashion [3], celebrated the letter as “heartwarming,” “powerful” and “brave.”
The Reddit letter read [2]:
Little Thing:
I can feel you in there. I've got twice the appetite and half the energy. It breaks my heart that I don't feel the enchantment that I'm supposed to feel. I am both sorry and not sorry.
I am sorry that this is goodbye. I'm sad that I'll never get to meet you. You could have your father's eyes and my nose and we could make our own traditions, be a family. But, Little Thing, we will meet again. I promise that the next time I see that little blue plus, the next time you are in the same reality as me, I will be ready for you.
Little Thing, I want you to be happy. More than I want good things for myself, I want the best things for the future. That's why I can't be your mother right now. I am still growing myself. It wouldn't be fair to bring a new life into a world where I am still haunted by ghosts of the life I've lived. I want you to have all the things I didn't have when I was a child. I want you to be better than I ever was and more magnificent than I ever could be. I can't do to you what was done to me: Plant a seed made of love and spontaneity into a garden, and hope that it will grow on only dreams. Love and spontaneity are beautiful, but they have little merit. And while I have plenty of dreams to go around, dreams are not an effective enough tool for you to build a better tomorrow. I can't bring you here. Not like this.
I love you, Little Thing, and I wish the circumstances were different. I promise I will see you again, and next time, you can call me Mom.
-h
In his response, Jezebel’s Mark Shrayber gushed [4] over the “brave, honest letter.” He explained how, “Even when [abortion is] the right choice, there's can be a lot of pain involved.”
“Beautiful and heartbreaking,” he concluded.
Similarly, The Huffington Post’s Nina Bahadur [5] deemed [6] the note a “powerful open letter.” And “this Reddit user,” she hyped, “is not alone in wanting to share her abortion story.”
Cosmo’s Lane Moore [7] highlighted [8] the “heartwarming letter” as “an important reminder to people who are anti-abortion of the myriad thoughts and emotions many women experience when preparing for an abortion.”
Pro-lifers, she said, “often accuse women who choose to have abortions of being emotionless robots who have not given any thought to the decision they are making (something anyone with half a brain knows that is untrue).”
After reading the “incredibly brave post,” Blue Nation Review’s Sarah Burris went into attack mode [9]. “The right loves to create a narrative of young girls who want to go to a rock concert on an evening and not give birth so instead they just have a late-term abortion,” she wrote.
She continued, “They like to pretend it’s all selfish women who want to kill a fetus and if they only force women to listen to a heart beat or see a blurry photo of a speck that she’ll somehow be able to afford it, or have the capacity to protect the child from an abusive father.”
But wait. Hasn’t the pro-abortion left just spent months telling us there’s nothing even “difficult [10]” about the choice to abort? That the right to abort is “a deeply affirmative value [11]?” That ending an innocent life makes a boffo plot line for a sitcom [12] and the centerpiece for a date-night romantic comedy [13]?
Pro-lifers were a bit more consistent in their responses, including The Blaze's Billy Hallowell [14] and LifeNews.com's Steven Ertelt [15], described the letter as “heartbreaking” and “heart-wrenching.”
In response to the myriad shows of support [2] on Reddit, the anonymous mom later posted [1]:
“Thank you, thank you, thank you. It is hard. I feel sick and awful for not wanting something that, at the same time, I want so badly. But I feel better knowing I'm not alone and now that I see it all written out, there's less madness bumping around in my head, which is nice. Thank you, again.”
But, dearest Reddit user, know that there is another choice you can choose – and that you will not be alone, should you choose it: life.
— Katie Yoder is Staff Writer, Joe and Betty Anderlik Fellow in Culture and Media at the Media Research Center. Follow Katie Yoder on Twitter. [16]