Of all the stupid pro-abortion arguments out there, and there are too many to count, the dumbest of all may be that made by Brian Sims, the belligerently pro-choice Pennsylvania state representative recently famous for shrieking at pro-life protesters outside a Planned Parenthood clinic. Sims did the world a great service by recording his hysterical haranguing of those protesters. He is, in substance at least, the radical pro-abortion movement personified.
Laying into a woman peacefully praying the rosary outside the abortion clinic, Sims asked her: “How many children have you clothed today? How many children have you put shoes on their feet today? Have you fed any children today?” The implication is that if pro-lifers are not willing to assume all the costs associated with raising unwanted children, they should not be opposed to killing them in utero.
This is actually a somewhat common argument on the pro-abortion Left, and we should give pro-choicers some credit for this line of thinking: They are being honest, however inadvertently, about what it is they’re after. If we take partisans such as Brian Sims at their word, then we can all acknowledge that the point of abortion is, in most cases, largely material: i.e., most abortions are motivated principally by financial concerns. This is not a theoretical proposition: According to the Guttmacher Institute, a huge majority of abortive women get their abortions for fear that they won’t be able to afford a baby.
Perhaps, then, it’s unsurprising that pro-choice partisans such as Brian Sims believe that one can only oppose abortion if one is prepared to shoulder the financial burdens of the children who are not aborted. But of course it is a deeply stupid argument, almost shockingly so. We should be very surprised that a grown man, let alone one elected to public office, could ever be so terminally ignorant as to make it.
Here is a useful counterpoint to illustrate the absurdity of Brian Sims’ petulant little rant. Imagine a pro-slavery partisan of the mid-19th century responding to the arguments of an anti-slavery abolitionist: “Oh, yeah? Well, how many freed blacks have you employed? How many have you given jobs so they can sustain themselves?”
An abolitionist, of course, was not obliged to do any such thing as a precondition of abolitionism. The point of the anti-slavery movement was not to fully account for every single need of every freed black person’s life. It was to bring an end to the active, poisonous evil of slavery.
In other words, one need not try to solve every issue in society when one is advocating the end of the worst of those problems. Such is the the case with abortion. Pro-lifers need not be able or even willing to offer much assistance for indigent children, though hundreds of thousands of us regularly do, and substantially so. But it ultimately doesn’t change the basic premise of the pro-life position: Abortion is wrong, it is evil, and it should be criminalized.
Sims is essentially guilty of a monstrous, lethal failure of the imagination. Apparently the only way he can imagine solving the problem of underfed, shoeless children is to ensure they are killed in the womb. That in itself is a sickening leap of logic, though it is made all the more horrible by the fact that it is a comparatively commonplace belief. In any sane, civilized culture, a man such as Brian Sims would be hounded out of office and out of polite society. We are not, it seems, all that sane and civilized.
Pro-lifers should push back against this idiotic line of thinking. It behooves us to point out that we regularly do feed and clothe disadvantaged children, and happily so. But it is more important to state, vociferously, that that’s not the point at all. You can oppose abortion no matter the acts of charity you do or do not undertake. If you’re against the legalized killing of innocent human beings, you’re already light-years ahead of men such as Brian Sims. Consider yourself lucky in that regard.
Daniel Payne is a writer based in Virginia. He is an assistant editor for the College Fix, the news magazine of the Student Free Press Association. He blogs at Trial of the Century.
