Among those who have just received the Medal of Freedom from President Obama is Gloria Steinem, who has done as much for advancing abortion-on-demand as any single person in the last half century.
In an interview with The Washington Post, she said, “Approximately one in three women in this country needs an abortion at some time in her life”. Aside from the dubiousness of this statistic, note that she uses the term “needs.”
Needs? Laura Enriquez has written convincingly on abortion as a preferential, not medically necessary, condition. What is clear is that what passes for “need” in the world of Ms. Steinem is actually the desire of a woman in a difficult or inconvenient situation to end a pregnancy.
This is not to say that women make such decisions lightly. Rather, human nature (male and female) being what it is, if a legal option is presented by which one can alleviate something hard, it defies the experience of recorded history that most people will not take it. The roughly 55 million unborn children aborted since 1973 within the 50 states are a grim but irrefutable evidence of that claim.
Here is what Steinem has said about the abortion she had 57 years ago:
It [abortion] is supposed to make us a bad person. But I must say, I never felt that. I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty. But I never could! I think the person who said: “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament” was right. Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn’t going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life, and therefore it felt positive. But still, I didn’t tell anyone. Because I knew that out there it wasn’t [positive].
Consider her almost unspeakably painful assertion, that “taking responsibility for (one’s) own life” includes taking a life that is not your own. Commentary about such a proposition would be superfluous.
Ms. Steinem has received our nation’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom. Yet she remains trapped in her own blindness, a state in which there is no freedom whatever. Christians should pray that in her waning years, she would come to know the true freedom that a forgiving and loving Savior alone can offer.